


he who is the keeper of my soul

by illiadeum (Zombias)



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Supernatural, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Ghosts, M/M, Past Character Death, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-21
Updated: 2013-01-21
Packaged: 2017-11-26 08:54:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 34,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/648815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zombias/pseuds/illiadeum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An accident...</p><p>There was an accident.</p><p>Next thing he knows, Erik is a ghost trying not to fall through the floor (or maybe through the ceiling – he can hardly keep track) of a hospital while his body lays comatose in bed. Then a doctor named Xavier is blabbering on to him about how he’s so bloody sorry that Erik saved his life and a little blond ghost of a girl is making him promise to stalk her older brother in order to protect him from a possible prophecy straight out of every cliché movie Erik has ever watched.</p><p>So, there he is, Erik fucking Lehnsherr, ghost and comatose patient to a blabbering doctor named Charles Francis Xavier, sworn to protect him from the ever-constant threat of the world (and probably himself).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Made for the [X-Men Big Bang Challenge](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/xmenbigbang/), round two.
> 
> Art masterpost is [here](http://clarounette.livejournal.com/1214.html), done by the ever lovely [clarounette](http://archiveofourown.org/users/clarounette), who deserves endless rounds of applause for everything she's done for my fic and all the work she put into every single one of her artworks for this. Special thanks also go out to [Kit](http://theinvincibleironmacchiato.tumblr.com/), for being the best beta I've ever had and staying up even when she was sick and not feeling well to help me churn this out to completion, and also to [Max](http://-ml.tumblr.com/), for helping me establish a more legitimate plotline than just "ghosts, crazy ass scenery, and then sex later."

_It’s time to wake up now._

Erik flails a moment to get his bearings as he snaps upright in bed – not his bed, not his room, not his apartment, and _bike_ and _accident_ and _hospital_ – and he suddenly thinks that sitting up might not have been the best idea he had ever had, but he realizes that he can’t actually feel anything. But if there was an accident, and he’s in the hospital, he thinks, then he must be hurt. If he’s hurt, then he should feel pain. Basic knowledge. Common sense. _Absolute_ logic, right? But he feels nothing. Or, at least, he feels no pain. He can feel the bed sheets, his hospital clothes – trousers, a shirt, not a gown, thank god – and the way his head pounds with an urgency like he forgot something he had to do. But it’s not pain. There’s no pain. He waits for it.

Nothing.

He swings his legs over the bed and bare feet touch cold tile. He thinks he’ll shiver, but then he doesn’t, even as he pushes himself up so all of his weight is on his two bare feet on the cold floor. He feels it, but he doesn’t _feel_ it. Maybe his nerve endings were fried off? But that doesn’t make sense either; he can feel the floor, feel the hem of the hospital-issued trousers on his ankles. And his feet are miraculously clear of any visible cuts. Not even a bruise. He can stand – he’s standing – and he feels no pain. He can feel the floor, feel the weight of himself on it. But no pain.

Is he healed, then? Maybe he had been out so long he healed. But then wouldn’t he be sore? And he isn’t.

And if this is a hospital – which it definitely is – wouldn’t him waking up and getting out of bed trip an alarm or something? Set off his IV? Like in the movies, right? What kind of hospital is this, then? A fucking useless one, that’s what it is. He’ll have to go get someone himself.

He takes a step towards the door and the floor feels cold – and then it doesn’t. Then it doesn’t feel like anything at all, and he’s falling forward and his hands go out to catch himself and he watches as his left hand goes through the floor up to his elbow and _his hand just went through the floor._ He panics and he crashes down on his left side, his face smashing down without really any sort of feeling to it, his right hand braced on the floor with the left gone through all the way up to his shoulder.

He curses so loudly it echoes back into his head and then his hand comes back but then _oh god_ he can’t see his legs and then he’s half a torso _half through the fucking floor._ His hands scrabble for a moment on the floor and he kicks and kicks like he’s swimming in too-deep water and tries to pull himself up and he can’t he just can’t quite get it right and he’s panting and he’s about to scream for help and—

“Alright, Mr. Lehnsherr,” a voice says, calm and soft and Erik stops struggling, eyes opening wide – well, more wide than they already were, if that’s even possible – as they move to the door, where there’s a short man with dark hair in a white doctor’s coat closing the sliding door to his room. He seems calm, completely serene, and Erik is already biting back the urge to yell and to scream and to ask just what the fuck is going on and why he is _half-way through the floor_ because the doctor is speaking again, looking over a clipboard as he turns around and Erik just gapes at him as he speaks, saying, “Let’s just see what we have on our hands here.”

“What we ‘ _have on our hands here’_ is that I’m half-way through the fucking floor, you idiot!” Erik nearly spits on the man’s shoes – if only he were close enough to actually do so. “What the fuck do you think we _have on our hands here?_ ”

But then Erik is gaping even more, because the doctor just walks past him _like he’s not even there_. Erik can feel the vein almost bursting in his forehead with anger, his lips twitching back into a snarl as the man stands next to the bed, and isn’t this just fucking _great,_ he thinks as he’s once again cut off from what he’s about to say as the other speaks.

“Well, you were in an accident, Mr. Lehnsherr, and a rather strange one at that,” the doctor says, talking to him like he isn’t falling through the floor right now. The man – Erik can see his name tag now as he turns, _Dr. Xavier_  –  flips over sheet after sheet on his clipboard and continues, “Yes, you were hit by a black Corolla, although the driver didn’t stay at the scene, it seems, as when the police arrived there wasn’t anyone in the vehicle – actually, it appeared that there had been never been anyone in the vehicle at all! It’s all very action movie-like if you ask me,” he continues, and Erik doesn’t really care about that right now – all he _does_ care about is why he’s suddenly become some lunatic part of the Fantastic fucking Four, god damn it! He’s about to speak again, but this Xavier guy seems to have a really bad habit of cutting him off, almost like he isn’t half though the floor or something, because did we forget that he’s _half through the floor right now?_

And softly, tiredly, Xavier laughs as he turns to the bed, sets the clipboard down, and Erik is struck for a moment. “You know, the other doctors think that if I hadn’t been at the scene, you wouldn’t be alive right now.” Suddenly, Erik realises that something is really, _desperately_ wrong here, and not just the fact that he’s currently being cut in half by the floor. “Can you believe that?” Should he? “I know I hardly can–” that makes two then “– but it was the least I could do to help –” _Help?_ He’s half through the fucking floor! “– especially after you saved my life –” _what is this guy even talking about_ “ – even if it does mean that my efforts have left you in a coma right now.”

What?

“But it’s better than dead, right?”

What?

“At least, I hope it is. I wouldn’t really know…”

_What?_

Erik can feel his legs again, feel his feet, and then he’s rising from the floor by some power he can’t quite control, and then he’s following Xavier’s line of sight, and then he’s – Erik is – also in the bed— _his body is in the hospital bed_. He can’t breathe. Actually, he finds he doesn’t have to. If he did have to, he supposes that would have been a punch to the chest that would have left him breathless. But right now he just feels like nothing. He can feel the floor, feel his fingers, feel his clothes. But nothing else. It doesn’t register. Nothing does. Nothing will. Because he’s looking at his own body lying in bed. Comatose. Dead to the world. Well, not really dead – it seems the heart monitor is still beeping rhythmically away – but damn-well close enough. He may as well be. That’s what he feels like. Dead.

But maybe not so. There’s no white light. No voices calling to him. No loved ones from beyond the grave beckoning him to beyond the pearly gates or whatever. Or maybe that’s all bullshit. He’d always believed it was before. But now, looking at his body, lying in a hospital bed, comatose and an absolute wreck of a man with his bruises and gashes and broken bones, he’s feeling a little confident. Yeah. It’s better than dead, right?

He keeps telling himself that.

Then Xavier is turning and picking up his clipboard again and circling around the bed and walks _straight through him_ and Erik’s still stricken. It takes Xavier sneezing and his soft “Oh my goodness” as he excuses himself to break him from his daze. Or not-daze. What would be a daze if he was actually in his own body.

Except that he isn’t.

“So, I’m Dr. Xavier,” he’s saying as he circles the bed, checking all the little machines and scribbling things on his clipboard that Erik neither pays any real attention to nor could really understand even if he was, “and I’m going to be your attending physician for the time being. Well, I say ‘time being’, but none of us really know how long you might be this way… we’ve called your parents, too – er, you know, I don’t mean to make you seem like a boy in primary school getting in trouble, but they’re your only next of kin as far as we can tell. They’ll probably be up in the next day or so to see you. I spoke to them personally, and they probably left to call off work as soon as we hung up the phone. They said they wanted you to stay in my care after what I had done for you at the accident. They seemed so thankful – they were so worried about you. It must be nice, having something like that. You’ve left them jurisdiction, too, so they’ll really be calling the shots for the most part, sorry about that.” Then Xavier is done talking for now, and Erik sits in a chair on the side of the room next to him and cradles his head in his hands. _Dead_. He wonders what will happen to him. If suddenly, someday, he’ll be sucked up and gone from this world, and then his IV and heart monitor will crash and this little doe-eyed doctor will come running into the room with nurses who couldn’t be but an inch or two smaller than him with a crash cart to resuscitate him. He supposes that if he were alive and hydrated and human right now, he’d cry. But he doesn’t. He just sits in the chair with his hands clasped together and his elbows on his knees and watches Xavier poke about.

That's when he hears her, her soft, lighthearted giggle, the kind that only a child could make, and one at the expense of another’s misfortune. He follows that sound with his eyes and they land upon a small girl, one with bright eyes and blonde hair. Their gazes meet - she's looking at him. She can  _see_  him.

His eyes go wide and she laughs again, but then she ducks out the door, and she's gone from his sight. He's up on his feet immediately after her, dashing out of the room, following her footsteps, calling after her - "Hey! Hey, wait!" He skids into the corridor of nurses and doctors moving to and fro busily, none noticing him as he looks about, frantic and helpless.

He catches a glimpse of golden hair flash down the hall and he can hear her soft laughter, like they're playing a game of tag.

"Please," he calls after her, before he starts down the corridor, nearly sprinting, rounding the corner after her, dodging around stretchers and IV lines and patients even though he probably doesn’t have to. "Please wait!"

She doesn't wait for him though, and he's left turning through what feels like damn near every corner in the hospital when finally,  _finally_  she stops.

He's just turned the corner, and he knows that if he were in his own body now, he would pant for breath, but he finds he doesn't need to now.

She's waiting for him.

There she is, standing in front of a door at the end of the hall. She's standing and waiting for him. She can't possibly be more than twelve years old, maybe even less. She stands in a white dress that flows outwards in layer after layer of what he can only describe as looking like it were made of angels' wings, so white and pristine as it falls about her, down to her little knobby knees.

If he thought angels existed, she would be one.

"Can you see me?" he asks, padding slowly down the hall to her now that she's waiting for him. Step after step and she doesn't move, a smile on her face, her hands held behind her back. "Can you see me?" He asks again, just in case she didn't hear him. He can't help thinking of how small she is as she nods back at him, still wearing that smile.

Behind her, the door opens slowly, white light pooling out, so intense that he has to cover his eyes. He can hear her laughing at him as he watches her little silhouette turn around towards the light, waving to him in a way that reminds him of how a young child waves to a friend when trying to beckon them to come outside and play in the sunshine.

“Am I going to die?” He asks, walking forward into the light, one arm still up to shield his eyes.  She just waves him forward, waves and waves and waves, until her little shadow disappears, engulfed in the white, and he follows her still, into the light, and––

Yellow.

That’s now the only thing he can see as he steps through the door – yellow.

Stretching before him is a seemingly endless meadow of waving rye and wheat, dancing in ceaseless waves of motion by a breeze that isn’t truly present, the horizon that it stretches off into bound by mountains far, far off, so distant that they only seem to blur the edges of the vast blue sky. When he steps away from the door, he knows it; the only thing in hours that he knows for _sure_ isthat he’s not in Kansas anymore.

Actually, no, maybe he is in Kansas. Wherever he is, though, it isn’t the hospital in New York.

When he steps forward into the grain, it dances around his torso, beckoning him forward, and he follows its call. He hears the door shut behind him, and he turns around slowly, somehow not all that surprised, but just checking to see if the door is still there. It is, the shut door, just standing on its own in the middle of a field, no walls to hold its door in place and no evidence that there ever was a hospital on the other side. He continues moving forward.

“Hello?” He calls, and now he can see a tree off in the distance a little, what must be the only tree in miles, and what possibly might be the only tree in existence right now. _In this existence, at least_ , he thinks.

“Hello?” He calls a little louder.

His voice carries. There’s no echo.

He keeps moving.

Slowly he emerges from the high grass, into the small clearing circling the tree, and there’s no one. He’s alone.

“You’re not alone,” a voice says, and he knows it’s the girl, even before he turns around to see her standing at the edge of the clearing where he just came from. She, in her little white dress with her arms behind her back, who beckoned him here like they were playing a game. She can’t be much taller than the grasses beyond her.

“Where are we?” Erik asks as she steps forward towards him, almost hopping from foot to foot on the tips of her toes, like a ballerina walking across a stage, her eyes placing each step on the ground before her foot follows it.

“Away,” she says as she passes, whimsically, melodically, as easy as the non-existent breeze.

“Well that was vaguely specific,” he comments more to himself than her, but he follows her nonetheless. She’s the only way he has to go. He waits for her this time, but she says nothing as she practically dances towards the tree. “What’s your name?” He asks, and she places her palm to the tree, her fingertips brushing the bark as she begins to circle back around it. She’s gone from his sight for a moment, but then she peers around the other side, her skin shivering blues, her hair swept back in reds, her smile bright and pleased. Distantly, he thinks he should be surprised at this.

He isn’t.

“Raven,” she says with a little smile, then disappears behind the tree again.

“How old are you, Raven?” He asks then, and only when she peers around the side she initially came from does she answer.

“I was twelve,” she says, her skin and hair pale again.

“So, you’re thirteen?” He asks when she disappears.

She doesn’t reappear on the other side.

And then it clicks.

“Are we dead, Raven?”

Finally she appears again, this time looking how he thinks she might look if she were older, her hair tumbling over her shoulders in the same curls, her eyes shining the same colour, her cheeks flushed the same red, all the same. Just older.

“You’re not,” she says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world, strutting out from behind the tree in a kind of grey peacoat and skirt.

“But you are,” he says, a statement now, no longer a question, and she’s looking at him sadly, almost like she’s confused. She steps backwards then, back toward the tree, and only when she’s close enough to touch the bark again does she look away from him. Her fingertips trace the patterns in the bark, and he’s waiting for her again.

“I need you to help my brother,” she acquiesces, like divulging a shameful secret.

“Your brother?” Erik questions, and she doesn’t look at him as she circles the tree. When she peers around the other side, it’s blue eyes and thick black hair he sees, and the body isn’t a she. It’s a he. It’s _him._ “Your brother is Doctor Xavier?”

“The very same,” she says, but it’s not her speaking. It’s her brother’s voice, and, for the briefest of moments in the back of his mind, Erik wonders if he’s really losing it, but only because the two don’t look all that much alike. Well, no, right now, they look the same – they _are_ the same – but not otherwise.

She interrupts his thoughts. “Will you help him?”

She’s herself again. He hadn’t even noticed her change at all.

“Why do I have to help him?”

“You’re meant to save each other,” she tells him, like he’s just supposed to go with it. He cracks.

“What is this, the _Chronicles of Narnia?_ Prophecies, fate, destiny, whatever – that doesn’t happen. People aren’t just ‘meant to be’ or whatever, you know. Things just happen and—”

“And this is happening,” she says, her voice more serious than he thinks a girl her age should ever have to speak with. _But then again, she’s dead,_ his mind supplies, and then he feels his stomach curl with guilt. He just yelled at a dead twelve-year old. Awesome. He gets the good person award for the decade.

“Will you help him?”

He can’t.

“I need you to help him.”

He’s not sure.

“Please, promise me you’ll help him.”

He can almost hear her cry.

“I promise,” he breaks. He gets the feeling it’s the only way out. “But you need to tell me what I have to do.”

Her palm is on the bark of the tree again. “You’ll know what to do,” and suddenly he doesn’t feel so bad for getting angry before, and her eyes are downcast, and he hates this already before it’s even begun.

“Seriously, enough of the cryptic bullshit,” he nearly spits, but that’s all he can really get out before he feels a tug on the back of his shirt, his shoulders, his arms, his thighs, and suddenly she seems so much farther away, and all he needs to know is what to _do,_ what is he supposed to _do_ , and he’s screaming after her to tell him what to do, and all she does stand there beside that big tree in her little body, and _tell me what I’m supposed to do._

The door slams.

 He’s in the hospital again.

He bangs his head against the door. If he were alive, he’d feel it. And it’d hurt like hell.

“Fuck.”


	2. Chapter 2

And so, without further ado, this is Erik Magnus Lehnsherr’s fucking life right now.

Or, not life. He’s still not sure how to phrase that. Half-life? Technically speaking (read: according to _Doctor Xavier_ ), he _is_ alive. He’s just not… sentient? Though, that doesn’t sound right either.

Whatever. Living or not, he’s sitting in a chair in Xavier’s office with his knees up on the seat like an impatient and unhappy child, waiting for the man to come in and clock out after he’s finished making his rounds, and trying to make sense of his… his half-life. Which, by the way, doesn’t make any fucking sense at all. Not a wink. If he could wink? He supposes he can still wink - it’s just that no one would actually be able to see it— _goddammit, Xavier, fucking clock out already_ , he thinks, exactly as Xavier walks back into the room. Well, what do you know, speak of the devil and he appears.

(Actually, _don’t_ speak of the devil. For right now, Erik’s sure that that’s one thing he _is_ sure he wants to hold off on, thank you very much. He’s been proven wrong too many times already today.)

Xavier flips over pages on a clipboard one last time, reading word after word carefully before nodding to himself and laying the clipboard down on his desk. Then he proceeds to carefully arrange his pens on the edge of his blotter. Erik levels him with a glare.

“Stop fucking around, I want to get out of here,” Erik growls.

Suddenly, Xavier stops and takes a step back from his desk, eyes moving up to look carefully around the room. Erik goes still.

“Xavier?” Erik says, more tentative. Charles turns around and looks out the windows of his office and into the dark of the night beyond.

“Must be very windy out today,” he hums almost appreciatively as he sits down at his desk and begins flipping through a stack of papers there. Erik nearly snarls at him. He just wants to leave and have a good sleep, during which time he can pretend he’s really dead and that he doesn’t have to deal with any of this nonsense. After what seems like an hour, Xavier finally stands up again, drawing Erik’s hopeful attention back up to him. The man then circles his desk to his coat tree by the door, humming softly to himself a song Erik can’t say that he knows. As he dons himself with a dark grey peacoat – Raven comes to mind suddenly – and a scarf, Erik stands, moving quietly to the side. He wonders for a moment if he’ll feel the cold outside. He shivers at the thought.

To his surprise, though he can feel the ground (and, thankfully, _continues_ to feel it – no more incidents like this morning, knock on wood) and the hardness of it under his feet, he can’t feel the cold air around them that makes Xavier shiver rather violently when they first step out into the night. He considers a moment laughing at Xavier – the man must be British with that accent of his; he should be able to stand weather like this. Plus, he lives in New York. You don’t live in New England if you can’t handle the weather. That’d be like an arctic fox trying to live in Florida. Or, backwards, he supposes. Like a lizard trying to live near the Northern Tree line. Aloud, he laughs at the image of a lizard falling straight off the tree, like they were reported to do last winter when Florida got snow for the first time in decades. When he does, Charles glances vaguely in his direction, and Erik just isn’t sure what to do about that (which seems to be his current mode of operation – _what the hell am I supposed to do_ , the ever-unanswered question of the day).

To his dismay, however, he can _also_ feel the sticky floor of the New York Subway system as he stands next to Xavier as he waits for the train. Fantastic. Just what he’s always wanted to experience. He’s pretty sure that if he were alive, he’d have a week’s worth of come, puke, and gum to scrub off his feet. Then again, if he were alive, he wouldn’t have walked outside without a pair of fucking shoes. But, as he’s currently standing, he’s stuck in the hospital bedclothes he was issued. On the bright side, he’s not naked? Then again, there’s no one to see if he were.

Surprisingly, they’re one of few to board the train when it finally arrives. Xavier easily finds an open pair of seats, so Erik takes the liberty of sitting down next to him. Xavier, luckily, keeps his bag on his lap instead of placing it into the seat next to him, saving Erik the awkwardness of having to sit on top of his bag. He’d rather not feel a messenger bag inside of his organs, thank you very much. Or, where his organs would be. He hasn’t tried to experience feeling them for himself. He certainly isn’t trying to.

The number of passengers on the train really is sparse. Erik watches each of their reflections in the windows as they run through the dark. Some don’t have reflections. He tries not to stare at their down-turned faces. He’s ridden the train hundreds of times before, he knows the etiquette. But now he has to force himself to keep looking at Xavier, instead of at the slightly-less-than-opaque passengers riding alongside people, bobbing along with the train and the other passengers in time.

Erik nearly sighs in relief when Charles finally stands up again and passes through him – there’s the sneeze again – and he gets up to follow, avoiding looking at any of the other passengers, those with reflections and those without. They quickly dodge people exiting the train and the station – Erik dodging more out of reflex than necessity – and make their way through the exit booths towards the exits. Erik has to admit that he feels a bit of a thrill at being able to ride the subway without having to pay a ticket, no one noticing him moving in or out and stopping him. It’s a nice feeling, to go unnoticed like that.

Quickly, Xavier makes his way onto the street with Erik following just behind, footstep for footstep. Xavier walks quickly, but Erik has a longer stride due to the difference in height, making it easier for him to catch up whenever Xavier quickly ducks through the small crowds.

Finally, Xavier turns into an apartment building. It’s plain-looking, not something Erik had ever really imagined a doctor living in, but then again, Xavier seems… pretty plain. Ordinary. He follows quickly after him.

“Good evening, Charles,” the doorman greets, and Xavier – Charles is his first name? Very ordinary, indeed – flashes him a bright smile in return, one that practically lights up the room.

“Good night, Janos,” he returns easily before continuing on towards the elevator. Erik wonders briefly as the doors close around just the two of them if he’s that friendly with everyone. Such a bright, happy, bubbly-looking exterior like his, he probably is.

The elevator dings at their arrival and Xavier steps out easily, moving down the hall much more slowly now, as if he knows he’s in a safe place. _Then again_ , Erik thinks, _a kid like Xavier with a job like his probably lives and breathes of safety_. The walls are white and clean looking, as are the floors and all of the doors they pass. Xavier’s flat – number 782, Erik notes for future reference – is just as clean, not that he was expecting any less. Erik waits for Xavier to fumble with the keys, unwilling to walk in first, though he easily could. He lets out a snort of impatience as Xavier finally pulls the keys from his pockets and puts it into his door.

The door opens and shuts easily around them, Erik half walking through the door as Charles lets it shut behind him without a second thought. If Erik were alive, he’d be offended, and he feels a surge of annoyance before he remembers that he’s only half-alive.

Xavier’s apartment is just as clean inside as it was outside, but with more shelves and more books. To his right is a kitchen, clean and sparkling. He pads forward, the carpet a plush, sweet relief under his feet, to the couch. He looks about himself there, noticing a TV surrounded by bookcase after bookcase, all stacked neatly and alphabetically. He runs his fingers along the spines of each, looking at their titles, their genres – it appears that he’s even arranged them according to the Dewey Decimal System. Erik laughs – how quaint. Of course Xavier would. Looking back, at the edge of last bookcases, there are stacks of books, some small and others perhaps even a metre in height. The guy probably spends hundreds – no, scratch that, at least _thousands_ of dollars on books alone. Christ.

Then again, Erik considers as he hears Xavier poking around in the kitchen, the guy _is_ a doctor. He probably has enough money to throw around, especially if he’s just staying in a one-bed, one-bath apartment like this. It’s spacious, but most certainly meant for one. Erik doesn’t even think there’s a guest bedroom.

Suddenly, Xavier places himself down on the couch and turns on the TV, a bowl of stir-fry in his hands – probably leftovers from another day. Erik sits himself down on the opposite side, leaving Charles closest to the door and he closest to the windows. He leans back into the couch – and, _damn_ is this a comfortable couch, he thinks he’ll be okay to sleep here – and settles in, mimicking Xavier in propping his feet up on the table, but crossing his arms in lieu of the absence of a bowl of food to hold.

The TV is turned on to some British TV show about an alien that looks like a human that travels around in a blue police box with a cocky blonde companion who is _actually_ human. Erik doesn’t think he’s seen the show ever in his entire life, but, he learns as the title sequence comes up, that he show is called _Doctor Who_. What a fucking weird name for a TV show. The alien, he learns soon enough, is called the Doctor, and when someone asks ‘ _Doctor who?_ ’ he finds himself stifling a laugh quietly, looking over to see Xavier grinning happily from his end of the couch. He looks like a little kid, curled up into the pillows and watching a TV show about a time-travelling alien. He looks even more like a little kid, Erik realises, as he slowly begins to nod off, the quiet sounds of the Doctor’s adventures lulling him to sleep. He looks kind of cute, too, his dark hair falling into his big blue eyes as he snuggles into the pillows, his cheeks flushed as red as he lips, eyelids drooping – and, aw, shit, he’s gone domestic, like some kind of housewife thinking how cute her boyfriend is as he falls asleep watching TV. Actually, no, a housewife would probably hate that he was falling asleep on the couch to _Doctor Who._ Besides, Erik’s no fucking housewife – if anything, Xavier would be, you know, if he weren’t a doctor. He’s got the face for it, soft and pale and flushed in the cheeks. He guesses that leaves him a boyfriend thinking his girlfriend his cute as she falls asleep on the couch watching _Doctor Who_? Yes, that makes more sense…

Shaking his head of the thought, Erik reaches over to tap Xavier’s ankle, trying to rouse him from his sleep so he’ll move to his bed. He shouldn’t sleep on the couch in his own damn apartment.

“Xavier,” he says, voice just above a whisper as if he _isn’t_ trying to wake him, which is completely counterintuitive to what he’s trying to do. “Xavier, wake up. Go to bed.” The man hums in response, nestling further into the pillows he’s got his arms wrapped around. Erik shakes him by the ankle again, and a shiver visibly thrums through the man that has him opening his eyes quickly, as if startled. He lets out a breath like a gasp and Erik leans back, afraid for a moment before Xavier blinks slowly, taking in the room around him. He sits up slowly, reaching for the remote to turn the TV off, shrouding the room in darkness aside from the faint light from the kitchen that he left on and the lights from the street seven stories down.

“Shower first, Charles,” Xavier says as he stands up, talking to himself and stretching wide. “Shower then bed,” and then he’s off to turn off the kitchen lights off and head to the bathroom, leaving Erik on the couch in the dark.

Erik sits back on the couch, glancing at the bookcases around him, the piles of books at their ends, the television, the kitchen, the light becoming dimmer as Xavier closes the door to the bathroom in the distance, the sound of the shower water running diminished through the door. This guy – this Xavier – he’s so ordinary _._ He’s just another guy. Erik sits and plays thumb wars with himself in the darkness.

Soon, a small amount of light opens back up to light the room, making Erik glance up and over his shoulder, down the hall to see Xavier padding out of the bathroom in his pants and a shirt, clothes folded neatly in his hands. Erik stands and moves to him, following him to the bedroom, to where he leans in the doorway as he watches Xavier put his dirty clothes away, folded, in the laundry.

“You’re so ordinary,” Erik says. Xavier continues about his business. He can’t hear him.  In fact, he walks past him without even noticing his presence, circling to the other side of the large bed. “You’re just a normal guy,” he continues, staring at Xavier in disbelief as the guy climbs underneath the covers and turns onto his side to go to sleep. Erik moves forward, walking around the bed to the side that Xavier isn’t occupying, slowly placing himself onto the bed, carefully, as if trying not to rouse the other man. Xavier doesn’t move much at all, except to get more comfortable and snuggle more into his pillows. Erik stretches out across from him, laying down on his side as well, hands snaking under the pillow to support his head a little more as he looks at Xavier.

After a long time, Xavier draws in a slow, small breath, and releases it like a soft hum, and Erik realises he’s fallen into a deep sleep. His cheeks are flushed a soft pink now, his blue eyes closed and gone from the world, his dark hair dancing across his forehead. One of Erik’s hands comes out from the pillow and, tentatively, slowly, so, so slowly, he reaches forward and touches gently the flush on one of Xavier’s cheeks. If it weren’t for the flush he’s touching, the warmth radiating off him, the slow and steady rise and fall of his chest, Erik would think he were dead, too. Xavier murmurs in his sleep and seems to nuzzle into his hand on his cheek.

“Who could ever want to hurt you?” He asks no one, and he receives no answer.

—

“Erik?”

It’s a little girl’s voice. He feels like he’s floating in the air.

“Raven?” He asks the air.

“Yes,” she answers, and slowly, it feels like he’s touching down onto a flat, smooth ground, first with only his toes, then the pads of his feet, then the heel, until he’s standing fully on his own, feeling the hems of his hospital trousers and the sleeves of his shirt settle back with gravity again. He opens his eyes.

“Where are we, Raven?”

“A ballroom – can’t you see?” She says, teasing, and, yes, he can see that. He’s standing in the centre of the large floor, a pattern in wood stretching out around him. The room is elliptical, lined with windows that show beyond a beautiful green garden and trees and trees and trees. On one far end there is a set of double doors, the other a grand piano. He senses Raven step out from behind him. “This was my home.”

“You lived here?” He asks, looking from the piano to her.

“Charles lived here,” she nods from next to him, her eyes looking from the piano to him. “He used to play songs for me on the piano over there.”

“I bet he was an excellent musician,” Erik thinks aloud, looking back to the piano, the seat at an angle from it as if someone had stood up from it abruptly.

“He was,” Raven agrees, walking forward, her white dress flowing around her like white flowers in a gentle breeze. “Even though I’d tease him for being an old fart, he’d always play me songs that I could dance to. He’d play for hours just for me.” When she turns back to look at him, she looks much older, late teens at least, perhaps early twenties, like she had before when she had disappeared and reappeared around the tree. The only difference now is that she’s wearing a pencil skirt and a black turtleneck, a golden necklace hanging around her neck that almost camouflages with her hair as it tumbles over her shoulders.

“How do you do that?” Erik asks, tilting his head at her. “How do you change shape?”

“You learn things, being dead for twelve years,” she says, shrugging at him before she continues on towards the piano, sitting down at the bench. When she looks at the keys, she looks deeply saddened, but she looks back then up to Erik. “Some of us get different powers than others. I can change shape into anyone I want, real or imaginary. The room you see around you,” she explains, gesturing at it, him following her gaze. “It’s like the field we were in last time – it’s just something I made up. Well, this room _is_ real, but this is only a manifestation of it, a figment of it – I don’t exist on Earth’s plane anymore, so I have to create a place to be so I can talk to you.”

“I see,” Erik says. “Can I do that?”

“Not the room, no,” she begins, shaking her head. “It’s only because I’m dead that I can create this room. You might be able to change shape – that I don’t know. It’s different for everyone. Your powers will develop over time.”

“Oh,” Erik breathes, as intelligent as he is. Raven looks down to the keys again, and lifts her fingers to the piano keys, pressing a few as if imitating her brother playing for her long ago. “Raven,” he begins again, “Why Charles?” She looks up at him. “I mean, Charles is so ordinary. He’s a good guy. He’s kind, and just… he’s _ordinary._ He’s a doctor – he’s not out there trying to make a new type of bomb or stealing some slacker scientist’s credit. What’s he done? What could he possibly _do?_ ”

“This was his house, you know,” Raven says, and Erik looks at her strangely, because how the fuck does that even answer his question at all. Just as he’s about to ask, she interrupts him. Fucking Xaviers must have a habit of that. “Through those doors is a mansion, the one where he and I lived when we were young. His mother actually married my father, Kurt Marko, so we’re not really related, Charles and I. But then they had a falling out after I died. Just before Charles began med school, Charles’ mother was murdered by Kurt, but no one found that out. It’s still unsolved at the police department. She left her entire inheritance – the money, the land, the estate, everything she had – to Charles. Kurt was furious. He had to wait to get revenge, though, or else they’d suspect him of Sharon’s murder, too.”

 There’s a long, heavy silence after that.

Then it clicks.

“The accident,” Erik begins suddenly, breaking that uneasy silence. “Charles said he was at the accident—“

“Yes,” Raven interjects, nodding solemnly. “That was Kurt.”

“But he hit _me_ ,” Erik argues.

“You got in the way,” she adds simply. Erik scoffs in rebuff. Got _in the way?_ “Traffic doesn’t exactly always work in everyone’s favour. He ran the red on your green signal and hit your bike. Luckily, neither of you were going too fast so the damage wasn’t fatal for you, but it did leave you…”

“Comatose,” Erik finishes for her. She nods at him apologetically.

“So because I _got in the way_ —” Raven winces slightly at the fierceness of his words “—that means I’m the one who has to save Charles from this?”

“You’re the only one that can,” she says, and she sounds sad, truly, desperately sad. “There’s no other way to stop him. The police won’t catch him. No one will even know he’s coming.”

“And how am I supposed to stop him?” Erik snaps. “I’m a fucking ghost! Charles himself can’t even see or hear me – hell, he walks right through me and then sneezes! I can’t even open a door by myself, Raven, how am I supposed to stop _a human being?_ ”

“You could use your powers, Erik,” she suggests.

“I don’t _have_ any powers, Raven!”

“Listen to me, Erik,” she says, voice firm and commanding. Erik swallows back an already growling retort. “Your powers _will_ come to you. Just give them time, and they will evolve in you. Experiment if you like – fly through the city, write on windows. Either way, your powers _will_ come, and you _will_ save Charles. You have to be patient.”

“Patience isn’t one of my stronger suits,” he huffs.

“Then you will learn that as well,” she nods, turning back away from him to look to the piano defiantly, raising her hands. As she does, the room seems to get larger, longer, the piano and her shape growing into the distance.

“Raven!” Erik calls, tries to move forward, hell, just _reach_ forward, but he can’t, he’s being pulled back. It feels like gravity is slowly falling out from under him, like the room is titling onto its side and he’s falling back, back, back and into—

Beside him on the bed, Charles turns in his sleep and Erik huffs in anger.

“Fucking _Raven,_ ” he snarls to himself, rolling himself off the bed from where he lay on top of the sheets, not even careful or slow so as not to awake Charles – like hell he even could, Charles can’t feel him or sense him or see him.

Erik gets up and walks to the window in Charles’ bedroom, looks out over the city that stretches beyond the glass. He can feel his cheeks warming in the early morning sunlight cast off through all the buildings of the city, the patch of sunlight slowly sinking down, framing his body as the sun slowly rises. He’s unsure of how long he stands there in the sun, thinking about everything, but before he realises anything, he hears Charles’ alarm go off. He looks back to the other’s man form, outlined by the thin sheets. Slowly, the alarm beeping ahead, one arm crawls out from under the sheets and taps the snooze button at the top with a groan. Erik turns away. He doesn’t want to watch that floppy-haired man crawl out of bed.

No, that’s the thing. He _does_ want to watch.

He stays resolutely turned away.

Slowly, he hears Charles get up. He hears him stretch, hears him give a soft groan. Erik closes his eyes and swallows and waits for Charles’ footsteps to make their way out the door. When he hears the door of the bathroom click shut, he opens his eyes and braces his hands against the window pane, looking out into the city again.

Suddenly, Raven’s words run through his head: _Experiment if you like – fly through the city, write on windows._

Erik shifts his weight back slightly and leans down. He moves forward just slightly and breathes on the glass, his breath frosting it over – just as if he were alive. He can’t help but let out a soft laugh as he raises his fingers slowly, each digit straightened with intent—

Behind him, he hears the bathroom door open and close.

Frantically, Erik brings his whole arm down the window pane, hoping to wipe away the condensation from his… breath. _Yeah, because that makes so much sense, Erik, seeing as how you’re_ not even breathing, he thinks angrily. Regardless, he hopes that change blindness will hold true even for the likes of Charles.

Luckily enough for him, the good old doctor doesn’t seem to notice at all. In fact, he walks right past without a second glance, and Erik lets out a sigh of relief instead. Then, from the kitchen, he hears Charles’ pager beep. The doctor turns around from where he is by the couch and moves, and Erik follows him close behind. He means to read the pager by peering over his shoulder – god, if he were alive, he’d be such a fucking creep, and he can’t suppress the feeling that he is even now. The feeling holds him back just long enough that he misses it, Charles pulling the pager back and hiding it from Erik’s view.

“Goodie,” Charles voices, and Erik isn’t sure if he’s being sarcastic or not from the sound of his voice. Being a doctor, though, Erik’s is fairly sure it’s the former over the latter.

They make quick work of the morning after that. Well, Charles does, at least. Erik doesn’t have to do anything. In fact, all he does is sit on the arm of the couch and wonder distantly if he’ll ever feel hungry again, or if he’ll ever have a craving for a steak. Charles catches him off guard by closing and locking his apartment door in the middle of Erik’s thought, causing a flood of panic to shoot through him. _Shit, he’s locked me in,_ he thinks for all of half a second, and then he remembers. He’s a fucking ghost, he can do whatever the fuck he wants. He glances back at the window.

Experimentally, standing before the window, Erik takes in a deep breath, and shoves his head neatly in the direction of the window and finds—

Well, he finds that’s glad he isn’t afraid of heights. Otherwise he may have shat himself just now, even though he’s only seven stories up with only his head through the window. He wonders briefly if he’ll fall, but Raven’s words about experimentation come to mind again. He might not be a fucking physicist, but he’s pretty sure that gravity is a pretty valid theory when it comes to Earth. Then again, he’s also not real.

Taking another deep gulp of air, he pushes his hold body through the wall of Charles’ apartment.

Seeing nothing beneath his feet, though, he feels his stomach begin to drop and, oh shit, _oh shit_ , he’s gonna fall, he’s gonna –

Well, apparently he’s going to stand in mid-air.

If anyone could hear the way he guffawed just then, he’d be pretty sure he’d feel at least a little bit embarrassed.

After all, he’s standing mid-air _seven stories above New York City._ Of course he can’t stop laughing at himself excitedly. He feels like a kid on Christmas – a kid on Christmas who learnt that he can fucking _fly._

 _Hell to the yes,_ his brain supplies him, and he’s certain that he has to agree.

He shifts from one foot to the other, watching as the people on the street below seem to pass between his toes. He looks up to the sky then, and wonders if he can go higher.

“Okay, Lehnsherr, think about stairs,” he says to himself, and he moves on foot forward. Then the other. And the other. Again and again, and he finds he’s standing on the other side of the street, two more stories up from Charles’ apartment. He lets out a holler.

Of course, that’s when he sees Charles walk out of his apartment building, and that’s when the _oh hell yes_ es turn to _oh hell no_ s and he frantically thinks about running down flights of stairs to catch up.

And, knowing his luck so far, that’s when he falls.

His stomach does a fucking _terrifying_ flip inside of him and his thoughts turn to a mantra of _shit I’m gonna fucking die,_ but then when he falls to the ground, he doesn’t feel anything. In fact, when he opens his eyes, he finds that no part of him is actually touching the ground at all. Erik reaches out with one hand, touches the ground – also something he’s never wanted to do, touch the cement of a street in New York willingly – and he feels it, but it’s about four inches out from the rest of his body, as if he’s resting on a slab of nothingness that’s cushioning him from his horrible landing.

He lets out a loud laugh that he’s sure would frighten children.

Slowly, he lets his feet find the ground, and he stands up and brushes himself off awkwardly a moment before sprinting off down the street after Charles.

He can fucking _fly._

Maybe. Probably. He’s gonna work on it.

—

When they arrive at the hospital, Charles immediately makes his way to Erik’s room in the hospital. They walk in and Erik feels suddenly overwhelmed, the two people inside standing to greet them with a soft, Germanic-sounding, “Dr. Xavier.”

Oh god.

“Mr. and Mrs. Lehnsherr,” he returns in greeting, his voice sounding soft and sad. In the silence that follows, Erik is caught between them.

How fucking awkward.

“How is he?” His mother asks, looking down at his body in the hospital bed.

“I’m okay,” Erik insists.

“He’s okay,” Charles repeats him unwittingly, smiling softly – sadly – at his parents. “Not much has changed since we last talked, but we did run some tests. As far as we could tell, he hasn’t sustained any permanent damage, but since he’s been unconscious since the accident occurred, we can’t tell for sure.” This doesn’t seem to calm his parents’ nerves, his mother reaching out for his father’s hand. Erik looks over at Charles, and Charles looks over to Erik’s body on the bed. “I think he’ll be okay, though. He seems like the stubborn sort.” Erik scoffs, but his mother laughs, a sad and amused noise.

"That sounds like Erik,” she says, but it sounds weak and fragile.

Clutching the clipboard tightly, Charles nods, looking at Erik’s prone, limp body. “I know myself that he’s quite the fighter – there’s hope yet, Mrs. Lehnsherr,” he adds, looking back up to Edie then, who smiles at him. Each of Erik’s parents makes their thanks known, and Charles leaves the room. Looking down at his parents – Erik can’t handle being there as they clutch each other and look at his body, bruised and bloodied as it is. His mother reaches out for his hand and holds it gently in hers and he feels his knees begin to wobble.

He leaves.


	3. Chapter 3

Throughout the remainder of Charles’ work day – all _twenty-two_ hours of it because, good _god,_ does this man _ever_ stop working? – Erik does nothing except follow Charles around, a good distraction for him as he tries not to think on his parents, following Charles instead through scheduled appointments, periodic checks on Erik’s body (the room for the most part thankfully devoid of the two senior Lehnsherrs, clearly a relief to both Erik _and_ Charles), emergency surgeries, and telling thirty-four year-old adults that, as _surprising_ as it may sound, they only have a cold, not pneumonia or some extremely rare lung-rupturing disease that they probably only heard of because they were eight pages into a Google search.

Eight hours into Charles’ shift, Erik is tired of all the nonsense that Charles has to put up with, and it comes to mind that he must be a saint, with twice the amount of patience and kindness as one, for putting up with not one, not two, but _six_ marriage proposals from various old women and delirious eight year-olds who are a little nervous for their upcoming surgical procedures. Charles, the kind bastard that he is, merely accepts them all with a bright smile and says that he’ll see them at the altar, and that they had better make it, because he doesn’t feel like being ditched at his own wedding, and Erik feels like he can only snarl at each proposal he receives. Then, of course, he can only proceed to defenestrate himself through the nearest available window, because he feels himself getting possessive when Charles isn’t even _his_. In fact, the only way that Charles knows him is as his comatose patient currently lying in a hospital bed, and then Erik begins to lament his life. Or half-life. Both, he doesn’t care.

Finally, Charles is given reprieve and told to go home, and while the doctor just nods that he will, Erik lets out a rather loud sigh of relief as he follows after him. When they get back to Charles’ apartment, Charles goes straight for the pantry after kicking off his shoes and coat, grabs the milk, and makes himself a bowl of cereal. As Erik sits down next to Charles on one of the two bar stools set under the counter, he wonders vaguely again if he’ll ever have to eat. He’s yet to feel hungry at all so he figures he doesn’t, but it really sounds kind of dull, living forever and not being able to eat anything ever again – not steak or pizza or latkes, none of your favourite foods. Erik bemoans his existence (or half-existence, what the fuck ever), but next to him Charles makes a noise like he’s going to be sick, and when Erik looks up to him, he definitely _looks_ like he’s going to be sick.

“Are you okay, Charles?” He asks, and Charles pushes the still half-filled bowl away from him, staring down at it like its half-emptiness is taunting him. It probably is. Erik can feel lines forming on his face in concern because Charles just looks… sad. Slowly, the doctor pushes himself back away from the counter and grabs the bowl, heading to the sink to dump it all down the disposal. “Charles?” He asks again, but, of course, Charles just walks right by and heads for the bathroom.

When Erik gets up a minute or two later, Charles walks back out of the bathroom, his hands slightly wet from washing and the toilet finishing its flush in the background, and heads for the bedroom, falling right down into bed with a groan and burying his face in the covers. Erik sort of wants to laugh because he looks like a tired child who is just _so_ ready to go the fuck to sleep, but he still feels concern thrumming through him as he walks through the doorway and into Charles’ room. He pads forward slowly, sitting himself down on the end of the bed, but exactly as he does, Charles’ head shoots up and Erik nearly jumps off the bed twice as fast as he sat down.

Charles slowly lifts himself into a position in which he can crawl forward on his hands and knees – and, god, does he have an impeccable ass – and quickly deposits himself where he slept last night, all but dropping himself onto the bed again and then curling up on his side.

“Charles, you should at least change into pajamas,” Erik advises, hoping that maybe Charles will hear him. Of course, he doesn’t, and, _really, Erik, you should have been expecting that_. He just stays curled up where he is, in his Oxford shirt, jumper, trousers, and socks, covers only pulled up to his waist.

 _Maybe he’s just very tired_ , Erik thinks as he crawls up on his side of the bed – _his_ side? No, just _the other_ side – but he can’t completely convince himself that it’s true as he turns to go to sleep, trying desperately not to think of how his parents might be coping with the news right now.

Sleep doesn’t come for Erik, though.

Apparently, though, it doesn’t come for Charles either, as an hour later he murmurs to himself, “Can’t sleep,” as if explaining to himself his own reasoning for reaching out, turning on his bedside lamp, and grabbing one of the books off the nightstand. As Charles opens the book to begin reading, Erik rolls over to face him, contented to just lay there and watch him a while and trying not to think of his parents.

Restlessly, Erik rolls back over and throws his legs off the bed, standing up and walking to the window. He needs something to do. Tossing a glance first back at Charles, who simply turns his page in response, Erik steps out through the window and into the New York night sky.

—

Slowly, Erik touches back to the ground at the end of the street, letting himself down gently onto the pavement this time.

On either side of him, townhouse after townhouse stretches in suburban New York, with cars parked in driveways and house lights lit up and down the street. Erik knows the neighbourhood well – every dip in the sidewalk, every bump in the road, every hole in every fence that he used to crawl over and under when he was taking shortcuts home from school. Looking around, not much has changed, except for what cars are parked in what driveways.

 _They didn’t even fix the pothole that’s been there since I was in fourth grade,_ he thinks, padding along the pavement and up the street. He turns into the driveway of a house – 24782 – and looks up at the roof of the two-story building, remembers the days when he’d come running home through all those backyards. He walks up the three steps to the door and presses his hand to the knob, a motion made more out of habit than anything.

He pokes his head carefully in through the door first, looking around at the darkened hall set out in front of him before he lets himself completely come through the door, and when his feet press without a sound to the floor, he shivers, used to hearing his mother’s heels, his father’s shoes, and his own feet make noise across the wooden floors. Never before would he have thought of the silence that greets him as _eerie._

Pressing back more shivers, he moves forward into the foyer, the floor plan expanding into the family room at his left, the darkened hallway into the kitchen and dining room ahead, and the staircase to the upper floor on his right. In the slow breeze coming in from the bay windows behind the TV to his right he can see white curtains flowing gently, as if welcoming his presence inside as he walks into the living room. Briefly he thinks about Raven spinning in endless circle in her white dress, imagines suddenly Charles in a crisp white suit at the piano, and he breathes in deep through his nose the scent of home, welcoming smell of his mother’s matzah ball soup and cholents.

Turning back around, he can see his pictures along the wall of the hallway and staircase. He steps up to them, scrutinizing each even though he knows each well: the farthest right of him in his cap and gown as he graduated from university, posing with his parents, then one of him at a swimming tournament posing with his first and second place medals, then of an eight year-old him playing at the beach, and lastly a picture of him blowing out the candles of a birthday cake, all far-off memories he never recalled having until he looked back upon the photos. He traces his fingers carefully over the edge of the frame of the last, the memory flooding him with warmth and light, even through the darkness of the room.

Erik turns away, the warm feeling lingering inside him, making his insides feel fuzzy, and he makes his way upstairs and down the hall, first passing a glance into his old bedroom – now turned into a study, just as he suggested it should be – before finding his way to the end of the wall. From the crack in the door, orange light filters out, mixing into the blue darkness to mingle in colour and shade, indicating that not only is someone home, his parents are awake.

Or, at least, they usually would be.

Peering around the crack in the door, Erik finds that both of his parents are in bed, having fallen asleep unexpectedly – probably while reading, both too worn out to stay up any longer into the night than they had meant to. Erik can’t help but smile softly, seeing their heads rested together as they curl up, their fingers interlaced above the sheets like a young couple who recently found love in one another, but Erik knows what that means. It’s what they’d do after they’d had a fight and then apologised, and what they did after Erik got into a fight he almost couldn’t handle, and what they do after they think they’ve lost everything, but just found out that there’s the smallest sliver of hope again, and that, even if there wasn’t, they still had each other at the end of it all.

 _Charles_ , Erik thinks, and he doesn’t know why that is.

Instead, he thinks as he begins his journey back to Charles’ apartment, about how he wishes he could turn off the light so they could rest peacefully, wishes he could do them just that one small favour, and doesn’t realise when the light from his parents’ bedroom clicks out without their touching raising a hand to the switch.

When he returns to Charles’ apartment, he finds the light there is on, too, and under the same circumstances; with the covers kicked down around his feet, finally in pajamas, he sees Charles asleep, his book fallen into the wayside on the ground, and Erik is thankful for that much, at least.

Erik lays down beside him in Charles’ big bed, and doesn’t think again when he closes his eyes and Charles’ bedside light goes out.

—

When Erik follows Charles out of his building to head to work for a 3AM call, he isn’t sure why he’s still there.

Actually, he isn’t sure why he came back to Charles’ last night at all. He holds little to no obligation to Charles save for a promise he made to a dead girl. Of course, there’s the fact that Charles is his doctor and is taking care of his body right now, but even then Erik is the one took the bullet to save Charles’ life. Well, it was actually a car that Erik took for him, not a bullet, but, whatever, it’s all going to come out in the wash either way, and all in Erik’s favour in terms of obligations. The point is – _the point is_ is that if anyone owes anyone anything, it’s probably _Charles_ that owes _Erik_.

 _And yet_ , Erik thinks as he continues trailing behind the other man, _here I am._

Though, Erik figures, he could be following – haunting? – his parents right now, and would that really be any better alternative? He isn’t sure which is better, but it’s not like there’s anyone else he can follow around right now. But at least if he was following his parents he wouldn’t feel like such a fucking creep all the time. He doesn’t even know this guy – better  yet, this guy doesn’t even know _him_ , yet Erik can detail the layout of his apartment without a moment’s notice. Fuck, he can even tell you in what order the guy hangs his clothes in his closet or what quality of fabric his curtains are, and that is just downright _weird_ , okay. It’s fucking _creepy_ , really, if he thinks about it.

So then what’s keeping him here?

Maybe, he thinks, it’s the promise he made to the guy’s dead sister. But even that – what is that excuse? He’s broken promises to women before, so it’s not like this is a first. Heck, he’s even broken a promise to a twelve year-old before, so that’s not a first either – albeit, she wasn’t dead and all she wanted was his first kiss, but, hey, he was eleven and didn’t like other people very much, can you blame him for skipping out on her? He always kind of regretted that she went crying to her friends after he put a hand up to her mouth to stop her, but he didn’t really feel _that_ guilty. He never really liked girls that much then anyway, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.

And, even then, Raven didn’t promise him _anything_. Sure, the other girl didn’t either, but this is kind of a life-or-death situation here. Life-or-half-life, whatever. Either way, she never said that him helping Charles would put him back into his body, so what’s even the point? Not only that, but nothing has even _happened_ to Charles yet, aside from the initial accident – or, not-accident, what the fuck ever with all of these terms –  which put Erik in his current position. There’s been no one following him – you know, except for Erik, which, by the by, is still pretty creepy, he has to admit – or threatening him or watching him from a distant rooftop.

 _At least not that I’ve noticed_ , a part of Erik’s brain interjects, and Erik presses the thought back down from wherever the hell it came from as he steps up next to Charles on the platform to wait for the train.

 _So what am I here for?_ Erik wonders, looking at Charles who’s looking at the wall across the way as he waits for the train.

Then, Erik feels it.

He feels a cool sensation, something crawling closer from a distance, coming down the stairs. It feels odd, cool and metallic, blurry in the shape of a parallelogram and rectangle smashed together, and he feels like he knows it, knows that kind of shape, knows he’s seen it _somewhere_ , at least in faraway places, like movies with brown and heat and deep reds, maybe in TV shows with apprehended killers and mafia bosses and—

 _Gun_ , Erik thinks.

It’s a gun.

 _Who the_ fuck _brings a gun into a subway?_ Erik thinks distantly, because he knows Americans sure as hell like they’re guns, but seriously, _what the fuck_ —

Then he looks.

On the staircase, a man looks at the back of Charles’ head determinedly, something in his hand.

“Charles,” Erik says aloud, eyes on the man with eyes on Charles with eyes on the dark tunnel.

He feels the hammer being pulled back.

In the distance, the train roars loud its approach.

 “Charles,” Erik says again, more firmly, reaching blankly for Charles’ sleeve.

The man reaches the bottom of the stairs.

None of the other people on the platform even bat an eye, not when his hand goes through Charles’ arm, and not when there’s a finger on a trigger.

The train is screaming down the tunnel now, the lights reflecting off the walls.

 Erik tries to scream over the din but instead becomes aware of the metal buckle of Charles’ belt and the rivets in his shoes.

The man raises his gun.

“ _Charles!_ ”

The trigger is pulled back.

Then, there’s screaming, subway brakes, a barely audible grunt, a rattling of something going under the train, and a smear of blood along one support pillar.

From the bottom of the pillar, there’s a small grunt of pain from a pale man with a mess of dark hair, and Erik sighs in relief.

Underneath the train, the gun clatters to a rest on the tracks, the bullet stock-still inside the barrel.

“Oh god,” Erik hears, from Charles, from people on the platform, from people inside the train, a chorus of praises and gasps and stunned silence from all over the underground.

People are now kneeling down by Charles, checking to make sure he’s alright, but Erik is by far the closest, on his knees in front of him, hands shaking, overcome by the need to reach out and stroke back his hair and find the spot of blood at the back of his head where Erik smashed him into the pillar using his belt buckle – and, fuck, how did he even _do_ that – but even then it’s not that important because he needs to make sure Charles is okay and that he’s still conscious and not dead and—

“Erik,” comes a groan, barely a whisper in pain.

Erik has a moment of pause, caught in the mention of his name, looking down to Charles’ blue eyes which are locked on his.

“Charles?” He asks in return, but Charles’ eyes shut and his head lolls to one side. “Charles, can you see me?”

“Oh god, Erik…”

“Uh, yes?” A man beside them asks, clearly startled that Charles called out his name. Erik and Charles both look up to him, stunned.

“Oh,” Charles breathes intelligently, his face clearly showing his realization. “Sorry, no,” he begins again, his eyes casting around, and Erik feels hope spark inside him because Charles can _see_ him and he’s going to look right back at him and—

But Charles’ eyes overlook him, just like they usually would, and Erik’s smile fades. Charles looks around a bit more, as if trying to look for a person he can’t seem to find any more, lost in the sea of people buzzing about him, like a, like a—

Erik sits back on his heels.

Like a ghost in a crowd.

“Sorry,” Charles says again after one last quick search of the crowd, looking back to the other man – Erik, or Eric, or maybe even Erick, since he responded to Erik’s name. “That’s, uh, my… I thought I saw a friend of mine,” he finishes in lieu of a real explanation, and Erik feels his heart nearly burst, until Charles is just rolling his head back and closing his eyes tiredly. Then Erik doesn’t know what to do.

Behind him, as someone dials the number for a hospital, Charles says, “Ask for Moira MacTaggert, please.”

—

“What’s your name?”

“You know my name.”

“Just answer the question, Charles.”

“My name is Charles Francis Xavier, I was born September 27th in the same year you, Moira MacTaggert, were born, and I know you’re going to hold up three fingers – you always do.” In response, Dr. MacTaggert levels him with a glare, and Erik has to smile a little from the corner of the room at Charles’ exasperation. “Are we going to do a light test now, then?”

“Of course,” comes Dr. MacTaggert’s response, and Charles flinches back as a small light is flashed into his eyes without much more warning. After a few moments of the light flicking back and forth between one blue eye and the other, Dr. MacTaggert clicks off the light and places it simply back into her pocket, leaving Charles blinking to adjust from his position on the table.

Looking at a chart she’s already scribbled a few notes on, she asks, “Do you have any persistent headaches?” When Charles answers in the negative, she continues on with an arsenal of questions, “Any feelings of persistent tiredness? Irritability, depression, nervousness? Numbness? Nausea? Trouble concentrating? Blurry or doubled vision?” and when Charles falters just half a second too long on the last one, she looks up at him in concern, making Charles squirm slightly on the examination table and Erik pay just a little more attention to what’s going on across from him from his position by the door.

“Charles?”

“I don’t really think it was anything to do with the accident,” he begins, but her stare shows a warning, and he flushes just a little. “I just – I just thought I saw one of my patient’s faces in the crowd after it happened, that’s all. He just looked a lot like him.”

Though Erik knows the lie for what it is, Dr. MacTaggert lets out a low hum and eventually nods, her features growing soft from where they were hard and threatening and _concerned_ before. “I think you might just be overworking yourself, Charles. You know how you are.”

Then, Charles looks up from his feet hanging off the edge of the examination table to the door over Moira’s shoulder.

But Erik knows that it’s not the door he’s looking at.

It’s _him_.

“Yeah,” Charles breathes out in a sigh. “You might be right.”


	4. Chapter 4

After that, Charles gives no indication that he sees Erik at all.

He doesn’t glance at him on the train ride back. He doesn’t look over his shoulder at Erik when he takes a shortcut through a narrow alley. He doesn’t appear so much as even _vaguely_ perturbed when a ghost’s head goes right through his chest and makes him sneeze as they round a corner to cut through a car park. Even when Erik sits down in Charles’ desk chair when he lays down to go to sleep, there’s no indication at all that Charles sees him.

 _Back to the goddamn drawing board,_ Erik thinks, picking at the hem of his shirt once Charles is out for good. _Back to eternal boredom_ , and that makes him shiver just a little, both in fear and frustration.

Beside him, the pens shiver too.

Shooting one quick glance back to Charles to make sure he’s completely unconscious, Erik turns fully to the pens, sitting still in their container. He focuses carefully on them, trying to figure them out. Slowly, a feeling comes to him, of small, cool rectangles, of springs, of pen tips, just like it did with the gun and Charles’ belt and shoes earlier that day.

“Metal?” Erik asks himself openly. He would never have thought that would be a super power – at least, it’s never been in all the comics he’s ever been aware of. He was never really a big fan of comics, but he knows the basics – Superman, Spiderman, you know, with super strength and super speed and super vision and all that super shit. But _metal?_ That kind of power just seems… strange. That’s as out there as those X-Men comics and that Wolverine fellow. What were his claws made of again? Vibranium? Freedonium? Maple syrup? Something like that, he’s sure. He never really paid attention to that movie much when he saw it. He just remembers the guy being Canadian and having lived through a whole bunch of wars and that Erik couldn’t help but think that he was a fucking idiot. Like if Erik ever met a guy like that, he’d probably throw him off the top of a satellite.

Shit, where was he again? Ah, right, metal powers. The pens on Charles’ desk.

Looking over his shoulder again quickly at Charles’ sleeping form, he adjusts himself on the seat and lifts one hand. Sure, he feels like a fucking idiot, but it helps him concentrate. He focuses on just one pen, feeling out the tip and the spring inside and the clip on the end. He thinks hard about moving the pen, willing it just a little, holding his breath and focusing and focusing and—inside the cup, the pen begins to wiggle, bouncing gently off the other pens, and Erik doesn’t relent, _can’t_ , and keeps focusing, thinks about lifting it, and slowly the pen rises, shivering, into the air, and, shit, his hand is starting to hurt and shake with how much effort he’s putting into it, sure his face is bright red with exertion, trembling all over with it, and he can’t hold out much longer, can’t hold on, but just a little more and maybe he can get it to turn over and—

Suddenly, the pen goes flying out of his vision, and Charles jerks awake in bed, scrambling out from under the covers and falling to the floor.

“What the bloody _fuck_ ,” he hears, along with the pen rolling onto the floor, and he’s sure that if anyone could see him right now they’d say he was flushed red with embarrassment rather than lack of breath.

Turning around, Erik sees Charles on the floor, his bed sheets tangled and twisted around his legs and his hair in disarray and a small line of ink on one cheek.

 _Fuck_ , Erik thinks. _The tip must have been out_.

Below him, Charles looks positively _mortified,_ staring at the pen in his lap with everything from disbelief to fear to confusion. His eyes dart around the room, cataloging everything, looking for something, searching for _someone_ , for some explanation for why a pen from his desk made it across the room and across his face. Daintily, he touches his cheek, pulls his hand back and stares at his fingers. Turning back to look around the room, Erik knows he sees nothing there, and thinks that must be the scariest part.

“Shit,” Erik curses to himself, knowing Charles can’t hear.

Slowly, Charles disentangles himself from his covers, standing up and keeping a careful eye on the shadows around the room that seem to dance and taunt him. Erik sits quietly as the man stands up and looks more around the room, even though he knows Charles won’t find him, no matter how hard or how desperately he looks in his closet and under his bed and the lock on the front door. Somehow, that makes Erik’s stomach tangle into an uncomfortable knot, and he ducks his head and waits for Charles to lay back down for a sleep he thinks may just not come.

—

For the next few weeks, Charles is different.

Erik doesn’t know how long he’s been there, at this point. His body isn’t getting any better, his parents are growing more quiet, and Charles is growing slowly more and more paranoid. It’s in a way that kind of makes Erik want to vomit. He’s sure that if he could vomit that he would have by now, maybe just to make himself feel a little bit better, but then he’s also sure that’s some kind of nervosa that he learned about in secondary school and isn’t entirely willing to take that chance. It’s not like anything would come up anyway.

A sick little part of his brain adds in, _I’m pretty that’s_ also _some kind of nervosa,_ but he shoves it aside. What’s it matter? He’s mostly dead anyway.

So there he is again, like always, sitting in Charles’ living room whilst the good doctor Xavier keeps fidgeting in his seat across from him, changing positions like he can’t quite get comfortable, not having turned a single page in his book since he sat down fifteen minutes ago. The book is pretty interesting, too. Erik knows – he’s been reading it over his shoulder since he started reading it. It’s not like he has much else to do, and reading an 800+ page story about a game of thrones is a good way to waste the extra time Charles has now. He used to never have time to read much, always cutting into his sleep schedule to do so, but since the accident, Dr. MacTaggert has slowly been giving him fewer and fewer clinic hours, leaving Charles with more time to be at home and read as he waits for a call on his pager. It’s probably a good thing if Erik’s to be honest, since Charles seems to be slowly going off the deep end. He has no idea what it is, but Charles has gotten more and more fidgety over the past few weeks he’s been there, twiddling his thumbs and dropping pens and stuttering over explanations to patients about their various health concerns. He hasn’t even accepted a single marriage proposal in over a week, though he still gets them daily. He just smiles and reassures them the way a normal doctor would and moves on with what he’s doing.

Erik wonders silently what all this means, if it might be an indicator that someone Marko sent is here watching him and that he feels their presence – which he doesn’t think is very likely, since he hasn’t felt very many guns following Charles around, having become more attuned to feeling metal out now. Their shape has become far more distinct to him than most other things, holding a different feel and sound than anything else, and if there’s ever been a gun present, it followed Charles for maybe a block or two before heading off elsewhere, leaving Erik at a stalemate for what to do and think for an explanation when it comes to Charles’ recent behaviour.

Slowly, he sees Charles give up, just as he always does, slipping in his bookmark and shutting the huge novel and putting it down to sigh and rub at his eyes. He hasn’t been sleeping well either, waking in fits and starts and staring off into the dark when sleep completely eludes him. Small, dark circles have slowly formed under Charles eyes, but still Erik can’t grasp at what it is that’s chasing away Charles’ usually peaceful sleep. There’s been no Markos. There’s been no glances over the shoulder to clue in that he notices Erik’s presence. There’s been _nothing_.

As Charles curls up rather too despondently for Erik’s tastes into the couch and stares out the window into the city, Erik wonders if maybe it’s depression. He doesn’t see any reason for it, but from what he knows of depression – which, honestly, isn’t all that much – there isn’t any reason for depression to be there anyway. It just is. A chemical defect of some sort in the brain, low levels of some - _amine_ or - _onin_ or another. Erik isn’t sure. The last psychology class he took was in high school, and they most talked about Freud, which Erik was annoyed by. He always preferred Carl Jung’s school of thought, because not everything represented the penis all the time.

“Are you depressed?” Erik asks softly, concerned, and, just like he guessed, Charles doesn’t even move at the sound (or, absence of sound) of his voice, just continues staring off into the void of space. He doesn’t even blink.

“It’s okay if you are,” Erik adds after a stretch of silence and Charles eyes move slowly to look at the cushion, then off again vaguely in Erik’s direction. Times like his have been growing steadily more and more present, and Erik’s never been sure what to do in any of them. Maybe it is depression.

Almost reluctantly, Charles slowly pushes himself up from the couch and heads towards his bedroom in what Erik can only describe as a trudge, dragging his bare feet across the carpet as he makes his way there. Once Charles is in his bedroom, Erik looks out to where Charles’ gaze had been out the window, fishing around for a line of what Charles may have been thinking. No answer comes, even after Charles has hunkered down to sleep, though Erik gets the feeling he might just be lying there, awake and unhappy. Serves him right that he isn’t a telepath. That may actually have been useful.

Letting go of a sigh, Erik settles down into the chair more, pulling his feet up and crossing his arms over his chest. It makes him feel slightly like a child, all curled up in Charles’ chair as he stares off into the distance in a bored, brooding silence, but it doesn’t really matter.

Eventually, hours pass, the constant sound of Charles turning over to try and get some sleep falling away into silence as he finally drifts off, and only after waiting another half an hour or so does Erik rise from his seat to check on him. Charles, he finds, for the first time in what must be two days or so, is fine. He’s actually asleep, and not turning over constantly or making small, very concerning noises. Somehow, that’s really relieving to Erik, lifting a small amount of weight off his shoulders. _Maybe_ , Erik ponders as he uses the metal of Charles’ doorknob to shut the door to the bedroom, _maybe tomorrow will be a better day, and Charles will awake refreshed and sing to himself like he used to when he made sandwiches for lunch or cook pasta for dinner._ A logical part of Erik doesn’t think that’s likely, but he hopes nonetheless, rubbing the back of his neck tiredly as he makes his way back to the chair.

Secretly, he kind of misses Charles humming to himself as he put away his laundry. At first he found it kind of annoying, but it slowly became endearing, and the absence of it was more disconcerting than anything else Charles had been doing when Erik first notice his downward spiral. That, if anything, was the first indicator to Erik that something was wrong.

But, still, it’s been weeks and Erik can’t figure out what it is that’s gone wrong for Charles. There really haven’t been clues to anything; he hasn’t taken notice of Erik at all – at least not any time that Erik has been aware of – and there haven’t been many Marko men around. Even Dr. MacTaggert has noticed the change. He’s seen her glance at Charles many times with a worried expression on her face, more and more frequently since Charles narrowly avoided getting a concussion in the subway, always asking him how he’s doing and if he needs any time off. Obviously Charles always answers that he’s just fine and that, no, he doesn’t need time off, thank you for the offer, but he does have work to do.

Eventually, Erik stands back up off the chair, unable to keep still while he thinks about this. He begins to pace the room, running a hair through his hair.

Steadily, he thinks, whatever it is, it’s been getting him down, too. He hates seeing Charles like this. In a way, it seems like he’s lost, like he’s just fumbling around and bumping into things without looking where he’s going, and apologizing to everything he does bump into, be it a person or a chair. And this is New York City. No one apologises for anything. Just looking at someone you pass by on the street and sharing eye-contact with them makes you both tourists. There’s no _hello how are you_ or curt nod of good morning here. You go about your business and nobody else gives a shit what you do as long as you leave them able to walk around you.

Erik scrubs a hand down his face. He just doesn’t know what to do.

And that’s when a baseball bat goes crashing through his head.

The swinger of said bat fumbles for a second as they attempt not to hit the bookcases lining the wall, giving Erik time to dodge out of the way of the next swing, if by saying _dodging_ you mean by _falling to the ground and scrambling across the floor_.

“What the hell!” Erik screeches, raising an arm instinctually to defend himself as Charles raises the bat above his head to slam it down.

A half second from swinging the bat back down, though, and recognition clicks into place for Charles, clear in his eyes, and then there’s a drawn-out moment of _what the actual shit is going on._

“ _Lehnsherr?_ ” Charles breathes out, incredulous and confused and all things _seriously what the fuck_. A sense of shock runs through Erik, actually making him very nearly _smile_. About to be hit with a bat, and he’s almost _smiling_.

“You can see me?”

“Wh-what?” Charles sputters, lowering the bat to his side, his face twisted in confusion. “Of course, I can see you, what the bloody hell is – when did you wake up? How did you get out of the hospital?” Charles face falls when he looks more at Erik’s face.

“I didn’t wake up, Charles,” he says softly, sadly, shaking his head just slightly. His arm is still up to defend himself, and he keeps it up. Just in case. Because what the shit. “I never got out of the hospital.”

Charles’ face goes from disorientated to _aw hell no_ in a flash.

“So you’re a ghost,” he says, half utter disbelief and half questioning. Okay, no, more like ninety percent disbelief. Whatever’s left over is questioning. Maybe.

“Something like that,” Erik accedes, sounding out of breath and wary. Charles really doesn’t seem convinced. After all, he is a man of science. Erik should have realised. “Look, I’m just as confused about all this as you are, trust me.”

“No,” Charles replies quickly. “What I’m really confused about is why you’re in my apartment.”

That takes Erik back a moment. “You mean,” he asks from the floor, “you’re not at all freaked out that I’m a ghost?”

“Unexplained things happen all the time,” Charles says, shrugging vaguely. “I neither believe nor disbelieve. I work in a hospital, for goodness’ sake.”

“Right,” Erik breathes, watching Charles warily as he slowly pushes himself upright to stand, leaving his hands up in a form of surrender so Charles knows he’s not going to do anything.

“So,” Charles begins, sounding impatient. “Are you going to explain why you’re here?”

“I… I really don’t know,” Erik say, glancing around vaguely and keeping his hands raised, although slightly lower now, more at his hips, as Charles keeps the bat in hand.

“So then why have you been following me around for weeks on end?”

“You – you knew about that?” Erik is shocked, really. “I thought you couldn’t see me.”

Again, Charles shrugs. “You kept coming and going since that day in the subway, but that still doesn’t answer my question.”

A picture of Raven in her white dress hiding behind a tree comes to mind, but he’s not sure if he should speak up.

“I don’t really know,” Erik says. “I swear I’m not trying to hurt you or anything, though, I just… it just seemed like a good idea at the time. I didn’t have much else.”

“Your parents?” Charles questions, but then seems to think better of it, so Erik doesn’t bother responding. He can see Charles’ jaw twitch slightly as he considers it all, but eventually he nods, his hand loosening on the handle of the bat – wooden, he should have known better – and Erik completely lowers his hands now that he’s not afraid of Charles smashing his face in – not that it would really do anything, but flinching is still an annoying reflex. Nodding Erik to come along with him, Charles moves back to his bedroom, meaning to stow away his bat, and as he does, he speaks up again, saying, “So, does this mean you’re dead? Because, if so, I’m gonna feel pretty crappy – you know, as your doctor and all.”

“I don’t think so,” Erik answered slowly, shrugging wide and long. “I’ve been like this for a while, but my body is…”

“Comatose,” Charles finishes for him, so Erik nods.

“Sure,” he agrees, and then there’s a lull of silence for a moment. “Does this mean you can see other… ghosts, too?”

“I think so,” Charles says, sitting down on the edge of the bed and looking curiously up at Erik. “The people in the subway that don’t have reflections, right? I wasn’t sure if they were ghosts or just vampires for a while,” he explains, and Erik sniggers softly. “What?”

“Vampires, Charles?”

“All myths have a basis, Erik,” he says matter-of-factly, “You can’t rule anything out without proof.”

Erik laughs loudly. “Are you a doctor or a conspiracy theorist?”

“Oh, you wound me,” Charles replies, faking hurt before he brightens slightly. “You know,” he begins again, “I once treated a man who drank blood.”

“Did he sparkle and imprint on your unborn child?”

“No,” Charles laughs, a bright, happy noise that Erik likes hearing. “Though that would be interesting, I’ll give you that. No, he just contracted HIV.”

“Oh,” Erik breathes out, as intelligent and witty as ever. “Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be,” Charles says, waving one hand with a laugh. “I’m a doctor, you know, I’ve seen worse.” Charles laughs softly again, then jerks slightly as he comes back to himself fully, remembering his original point, and Erik can’t help but smirk slightly. “But, the point is that, like I said, there are unexplainable things, and without proof, I don’t believe in any side more than any other – neutral party.”

“Switzerland,” Erik suggests.

“Yes, exactly,” Charles says, a smile stretching wide across his face – then both of them realise that they completely skipped over everything pertinent in conversation and Charles looks down at his feet and rubs his hands along his thighs, embarrassed and the silence settles back in, heavy and confused. Erik isn’t sure what to do now. Then again, nowadays, he feels like he never is. He shifts his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot, trying to find the words.

“Look, Charles…”

“You can stay,” Charles say quickly, effectively cutting him off, and it’s somehow clear that he didn’t really think it over before he said it – he looks just as shocked to have said it as Erik is to hear it. Nonetheless, Erik waits for him to continue. “That is, if you don’t have anywhere else that you… that you _want_ to go. Then you’re free to stay here. If you like. It’s your decision, of course.”

“I was assuming that it was actually your decision,” Erik smirks. Charles has the grace to blush faintly as he continues speaking. “You know, seeing as it is your flat and all.”

“Well,” Charles recovers himself, sitting up straight as if to present himself in a more serious, I-totally-thought-this-through-beforehand manner. “It’s my decision that you can stay – if you like.”

Erik laughs loudly, amused by Charles’ sudden poise in his attempt at appearing as if he had thought about what he had said before he said it. “Well, thank you, Charles,” he nods, smirking only just slightly. Charles makes a little face when he notices that he is, and then there’s a slight pause. Raven comes to mind, somehow. He’ll have to tell Charles about her eventually, he thinks. Instead, he says, “I’ll just, uh… take the couch, then,” he comments, pointing awkwardly over his shoulder in the direction of Charles’ living room.

“Oh,” Charles sighs, looking as if suddenly struck by something. “Well, yes. That would be good. Will you be needing a, uhm… a blanket or anything? I don’t know if they’ll just, ah… _fwip_ right through you or not,” he comments, gesturing vaguely with his hands. Erik can’t resist smiling, because, really, _fwip?_ “But I, ah, do have some spare ones in the linen closet, in case you’ll be needing them.”

“Thank you, but I don’t think I’ll be needing them,” Erik laughs in reply, brushing and phasing one hand through the corner of Charles’ bed in demonstration – which puts the most _ridiculously_ startled expression on Charles’ face that he has ever seen, and he laughs loud and hard.

“Good night, Erik,” Charles says firmly in exasperation to Erik’s derision. It’s clear to both of them that he’s trying very hard to stave off a smile though, and Erik’s smirk at Charles’ embarrassment falls down to something gentle and warm that makes him feel like he’s floating.

“Good night, Charles,” he says softly in return, and Charles smiles so softly back at him that Erik literally has to force himself to turn and leave the room.

As soon as he’s out of Charles’ bedroom and he’s closed the door behind him, he curses to himself, because, to his utter dismay, he finds that he really _is_ floating. _How fucking embarrassing_ , he thinks, _the guy wishes me good night and I turn into a fucking sap!_

“Oh, Charles,” he whispers to himself as he moves to the couch. “You’re really gonna be the death of me.”

—

When Charles goes back to work the next day, it’s like he’s completely back to normal, with all of the pep and smiles of his usual demeanour. He readily assures every clinic patient of their health, doesn’t fidget at all when he sits in the break room to wait for his next call, and even manages to receive and accept three different marriage proposals from two delirious, already-married-to-each-other grandfathers and one six year-old, the latter of whom he had bowed to and taken the hand of when she asked if he was Prince Charming But For Real, and, just like that, she swore she would never fall in love with anyone else ever again.

Eventually, Erik finds himself winding around the hospital and following Charles right into his own hospital room, where his body lies still in bed, machines chirping and beeping away in the background.

“Strange, is it?” Charles asks him from across the room, bringing Erik’s eyes up from his healing body to meet Charles’ gaze, his soft, almost sad smile.

“A little bit, yeah,” Erik nods a little breathlessly, his eyes shifting back down to his body briefly, the shut eyelids and the barely-there rise and fall of his own chest. It’s somewhat disorientating, he finds, staring down at himself in a way that is absolutely nothing like a mirror or the way he ever expected it to be. He looks back up to Charles, but the man is looking down at him in solemn wonderment.

Then, surprising Erik, Charles reaches out and gently places two fingers to his body’s wrist, holding his fingers there for a long while. From where he is across the room, Erik can feel the warmth of his fingers from where they are on his body, almost as if he were living vicariously through – well, himself. It makes him shiver, the feel of Charles’ touch upon his wrist, something he knows he’d never otherwise be able to feel if Charles reached out for him. His fingers would just go right through him. The thought makes Erik’s heart clench for a reason he can’t properly discern for himself.

“Well, your pulse hasn’t dropped,” Charles says, glancing back at Erik with a smile, and as he removes his fingers, while Erik feels the warmth from his touch steal away into nothingness, he feels a brand left over on his wrist, a hot-cold burn that won’t leave him. “If anything, it felt almost like it sped up!” He laughs at that, turning with a little flourish to check his IV. Looking at the heart monitor, Erik wonders if all that touching was really a necessary exercise, and feels the place where Charles touched his wrist throb.

Somehow, the memory of his mother holding his hand while he lay in the hospital bed when she and his father first arrived comes to mind, and he thinks about how he couldn’t feel her hand in his.

He presses his own fingers to his throbbing wrist and determinedly doesn’t think about it anymore.

“Are you okay, Erik?”

Whipping around to face Charles, who is clearly done checking his vitals and is now looking at him with concern written all over his face, he shakes himself free of his stupor.  “Yes, I’m fine.” He adds a small, “Promise,” when Charles doesn’t seem to convinced, and then it’s only a second before Charles nods and moves on, trotting out the door happily and babbling on quietly to Erik about something he hadn’t quite been paying attention to, but nods along with any.

His fingers stay on his wrist all afternoon.

Eventually, Charles receives a call on his page, and when he pulls it up to read, his face twists into something unpleasant that makes Erik cock his head and try to read the text over his shoulder; he manages quite easily, actually, simply because Charles is a little less than half a head shorter than he is, but what he reads also makes his face twist up into confusion.

“Why does Dr. MacTaggert want to speak to you?” Erik asks, looking to Charles who is shrugging under his chin.

“I dunno,” he whispers back to him, keeping an eye on anyone who could be listening in so he doesn’t come off as a complete nut case by talking to thin air and clipping his pager back onto a belt loop. “I guess we’ll find out.”

—

“Moira, you wanted to speak to me?” Charles asks, peeking into the examination room she told him to come to.

From her seat, Dr. MacTaggert looks up from her notepad, smiling widely when she realises who it is. “Charles,” she says warmly, “Good timing.”

“You wanted to talk to me about something?” The wariness is clear in her voice, and she laughs.

“Oh, don’t look so scared! I just wanted to ask you about what happened at the accident, since I never got a chance to read the police report, that’s all.” Charles nods, and it’s clear when the tension seeps from his shoulders. “Mr. Lehnsherr’s accident, mind you,” she clarifies, and this picks up both Charles _and_ Erik’s attention. What could she possibly want to know about _Erik’s_ accident?

“Well, I was there when it happened, on my way to work,” Charles begins, nodding as Dr. MacTaggert looks at him seriously from her chair. “Somebody ran a red and hit his motorcycle. I saw him hit the pavement and I went right to him. He was still conscious when I reached him, but he quickly went under, and since the hospital that was called was this one, I rode back in the ambulance with him when it finally got there.” Charles shrugs slightly. “That’s all, really.”

“Do you think that you having been on the scene will make you too… familiar to Mr. Lehnsherr?” Moira asks, and then there’s a small, heavy lull of silence.

“Are you accusing me of getting too—”

“No,” Dr. Mac Taggert cuts in, shaking her head seriously at him. “No, I’m not, Charles. I just have to make sure.”

“Why?” Charles insisted. “I haven’t done anything wrong, have I?”

“You’ve just been a little different lately,” Dr. MacTaggert explains. “You’ve been acting differently with patients all week. The nurses were beginning to get worried about you – I had a number come to me and ask if you were alright, and I had to make sure. The reason I ask about Mr. Lehnsherr is the fact that you were in his room checking on him for almost an hour today, when you easily could have left that in the hands of one of your nurses.”

Charles sighs out in relief. “Goodness, Moira, you could have started out with that! You worried me for a second there – I was just having a bad week, though, I promise. I’m fine today. I checked today on Mr. Lehnsherr because I hadn’t in a while, and I wanted to make sure that everything was going smoothly.”

From her seat, Dr. MacTaggert nods in understanding, and her face falls from something distinctly _Dr. MacTaggert_ to just… _Moira_. “Good! I’m glad to hear it. I assumed that what the nurses were saying was just gossip anyway, but I just wanted to make sure, you know that, Charles. I didn’t mean to scare you or anything.”

“That’s fine,” Charles laughs. To Erik, it sounds slightly hesitant, but Moira seems convinced and smiles at him. “I know you were just doing your job, no hard feelings.”

“Good,” she begins, but just as she does, Charles’ page beeps from his belt loop, and, with that, Moira waves him off to go do his job.

—

Later, when they’re in the safety of Charles’ flat, Charles lying on the couch reading and Erik brooding in the chair across from him, Erik finally decides to ask him.

“Charles,” he says quietly, and when Charles looks up, he continues without holding his gaze. “What was Dr. MacTaggert accusing you of? What was all that?”

Charles is still for a moment, but then slips his bookmark back between his pages and sits up, sighing softly and running one hand through his hair. “She was accusing me of getting too friendly with you. Getting too close to a patient – _especially_ a comatose one – leaves the doctor at a high risk for blaming themselves when… things go wrong.”

They both know what that means.

Swallowing thickly, Erik questions, “And what would have happened if she determined that you were?”

There's another heavy silence that makes Erik regret asking. A moment passes before Charles replies.

“She would have removed me from your case and handed you to someone else,” he explains, leaning forward to place his forearms on his legs, looking at Erik very seriously, more in contemplation than anything. “Erik, I am… running a big risk here.”

“Do you want me to leave?” Erik asks quickly, because it’s the right thing to ask. He doesn’t actually want to leave, he finds, and struggles internally with that feeling.

“No,” Charles answers, and he wonders if Charles sees him relax. The way Charles says it, though – it sounds sad, almost. It sounds lonely.

Charles sits back up, his eyes downcast as he sits back into the comfort of the couch cushions, and Erik feels overwhelmed with the urge to reach out and be the one to comfort him instead. He barely manages to stifle it, leaving his fingers twitching in his lap instead.

“No, I don’t want you to leave,” Charles repeats, shaking his head just slightly before he looks back up to Erik earnestly.

 _God,_ Erik thinks in that instant, _I want to kiss him. I want to help him._

And he does. Desperately.

Across from him, Charles is pushing himself up to stand, and as he moves to pass him, Erik reaches out for his hand and makes a grab for it—

And holds it.

But it isn’t Charles’ flesh and bone.

It’s like a copy of his hand, slightly white and blue and wispy, not completely opaque but not entirely transparent either.

Shocked, Erik lets go, and looks up to Charles, who is staring down at him in just as much wonder and confusion.

Erik’s hand begins to tingle, the way his wrist throbbed earlier.

“Erik,” Charles says, sounding out of breath. “What did you just do?”

“Charles,” Erik gasps out. “Do you want to try something with me?”

—

“Erik, this is insane.”

“Insane enough that you agreed to try it, yes,” Erik laughs in reply, clambering up on top of him to straddle his hips.

“I’m a scientist at heart, what did you expect?” Charles questions from where he’s eagle-spread below him on the bed. “I’m dying to try anything twice – once just to check, and twice just to be sure.”

“Yeah,” Erik agrees with more laughter. “And apparently you’re dying to try right now.”

“Is that a pun?” Charles smirks, and when Erik flashes him a look that screams _you did not just do that,_ he simply chuckles to himself and apologises.

“No more puns,” Erik says rather poignantly, but Charles is still smiling below him, and, shit, he really can’t help but smile back when he looks like that, spread out happily below him, ready and waiting. “Are you ready?”

“Let’s find out,” Charles says, letting his head fall back onto his pillow, resigning himself to his fate.

Taking in a deep breath, Erik says, “Let me hold your hands.”

Below him, Charles turns his palms face up, his eyes fluttering shut, and Erik reaches out to hold them, leaning over top of Charles, their faces mere inches apart. If Erik wanted to, he could easily reach down and just kiss him, he’s right there, right for Erik’s taking, lying spread open for him, he’s so easy, so—

“Well?” Charles asks, and Erik nods in assent.

“Yeah, sorry,” he apologises quickly, and watches Charles’ eyes flutter back shut, and he begins to pull himself back upright, keeping his hands clasped together with Charles’.

Below him, Charles shivers with his full body, his hips jerking just slightly, and, _god_ , Erik isn’t entirely sure whether to keep pulling or rut against him when he does _that._

Regardless of what his dick wants, he _does_ keep pulling, until Charles’ hands seem to separate into two copies again – Charles’ body and Charles’ projection of himself, his ghost, just like Erik is of his own body. The hands he’s holding are white and wispy, seeming to try and stay attached to his body with spiderwebs, which, as his projection of his hands move farther away and his body’s hands fall back down onto the sheets, seem to thin and shiver and snap, making it easier for Erik to pull him away from him, the web tendons then left over curling and fluttering in the air before realigning themselves into the skin of Charles’ ghost.

“Keep your hands where they are,” Erik says, and when Charles nods his head, Erik lets go of his hands. On the sheets his real hands stay, and in the air Charles fights to keep his projection upright, the sparkling spiderwebs that Erik pulled apart trying to reattach themselves.

“Hurry, Erik,” Charles says through clenched teeth, and Erik nods quickly.

He leans down and forward, moving to wrap his arms around Charles’ torso, wrapping himself all around him, trying to take him in and pull him up with him as he sits up, taking Charles’ projection with him. He sits up, hugging Charles close to himself, their ghosts rising together away from Charles’ shivering body, and below them both the silky threads connecting Charles’ ghost to his body thinning and breaking as Erik pulls him away. Charles’ mouth is open in a gasp, and Erik pulls him still, moving backwards on his knees until he makes it to the edge of the bed, taking Charles’ ghost with him, until they’re standing completely apart from his body.

He hears Charles’ ghost gasp in front him, Erik’s arms still holding him tight even though all of the white threads have disconnected and they’re standing apart from his body which lies still on the bed.

“Erik,” he sighs out against him, a whisper that both sounds breathless and _is_ breathless, just a noise without any air behind it.

“Charles,” he answers, pressed close, all of him against all of Charles.

Slowly, he peels himself back, keeping his hands on Charles’ shoulders to steady him and watches as Charles’ eyes flutter open, the colour coming back into him until he looks like an exact copy of his body on the bed, save for the usual flush of his cheeks, the redness of his lips dimmed from what they are on his body.

Turning his head around, Charles looks back at himself lying on the bed. “Am I still alive?”

“Yes,” Erik answers, and thank goodness for that. He’d have thrust himself into Hell itself if he had actually killed Charles. There wasn’t any guarantee that he wouldn’t have doing this. But, behind them, Charles’ body lay, his breaths quiet but present, like the slow rise and fall of his chest as he lays eagle-spread. In half a laugh, Erik asks, “Strange, is it?”

“A little bit, yeah,” Charles laughs as he looks back to Erik quickly, having caught the joke. His gaze travels back to his body though, and he licks his lips. “It really is, yeah. It’s just like I’m asleep.”

“Yeah,” Erik agrees softly. “One thing’s for sure, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Your body sure does look better than mine like that,” he answers with a smirk, and when Charles makes a swat at him, it connects with a slight sting, which just makes Erik laugh loudly. “I could actually feel that, you know,” he says, smiling widely at Charles.

“Good,” Charles remarks. “You were meant to. It’d be a real pity if you didn’t.”

Letting go of him, Erik takes a step back. “Come with me, Charles.”

“Where are we going?” Charles laughs softly.

“I’ll show you,” Erik says with an incline of his head towards the window. He makes his way towards it and easily steps out, until he’s completely outside of Charles’ apartment just like he did before, with New York City pavement seven stories below him. He looks back at Charles, sees his mortified expression through the window.

“Come on,” he says with a loud, bright laugh, sticking only his head and one hand in through the window of Charles’ apartment, the rest of his body remaining inside as he offers Charles’ his hand to pull him out. When Charles only recoils, Erik nearly pouts at him. He really _would_ pout. You know, if he were four years old still.

“Just trust me – do you trust me?” In front of him, Charles sighs deeply, but Erik can see the corners of his lips curling just so in the corner.

“With my life,” Charles responds in the sigh, and Erik laughs as the other man takes his hand.

“I thought we agreed no more puns?” He asks in a grin.

“Oh, my friend,” Charles laughs loudly, such a great sound that Erik just wants to hear on repeat. “I never agreed to that.”

With yet another laugh, Erik pulls him outside.

And then begins to realise that may not have been his best plan ever.

“Oh _god_ ,” he hears Charles say as he pulls him through the window and outside, sees him looking down to the concrete seven stories below them, and feels him wrapping his arms tightly around his, clinging to him desperately.

Just kidding. He lied. This is the best plan he’s ever had.

“It’s okay,” Erik murmurs. “I won’t drop you, I promise.”

“Don’t patronize me,” Charles half-growls at him, but his eyes on their feet where they hover in mid-air, not really focusing enough on Erik to put any menace into his voice. When he finally looks up to Erik, he asks, “Have you ever done this before?” To Erik’s shrug, his face falls. “Oh, yes, that’s very reassuring, thank you. I’ve always wanted to become detritus, you know. It’s been my dream since I was born,” he adds flatly, but Erik just smirks even wider at him, his eyebrows rising.

“Is that so?” Erik asks derisively, and as soon as his fingers begin to twitch around Charles’ arm in jest of letting him go, Charles clings to him even more, and Erik barks with laughter. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. You should have been expecting that, though.” Charles levels him with a half-hearted glare, and Erik shrugs cheekily for a quick second before his eyes dart upwards, following the skyscrapers up, up, and up, and he says loftily, “Do you want to try something?”

“What’s that?” Charles asks with a tilt of his head.

“To see New York City with a bird’s eye view,” Erik answers, finally looking back down to him with a smile that’s much softer than before.

“I don’t know why I trust you with these things,” Charles sighs after a moment, and Erik knows they’re both thinking about how Charles met him just last night, and how before that Erik was just his ghostly stalker. They both decide not to mention it. Instead, Charles’ arms loosen from around him, one hand moving to grasp onto Erik’s gently while the other falls back and outwards at his side, as if he’s raising one arm to keep himself balanced as he walks across a tightrope with Erik’s assistance, and Erik feels something warm and happy settle inside him.

“Pick a building,” Erik suggests.

“Let’s just go that way,” Charles points out vaguely, only lifting his hand to give a meager wave in whatever direction he chose.

“Spoken like a true New Yorker,” Erik teases, smirking at the shorter man.

“Born and raised,” Charles laughs, then seems to think on it and shrugs. “Well, you know, half the time.”

“Yeah?” Erik asks. But, in lieu of answering Erik’s question, Charles just tilts his head at him and smiles wide.

“Are we going?” He asks, giving Erik’s hand a gentle squeeze that fills him with warmth to the core.

With Charles’ hand in his, Erik looks from him to the sky, and gives a gentle kick at the air, using it to propel them upward. Charles is nervously delayed in rising after him, but when Erik looks down to him and gives him a soft smile, a small nod, and a gentle tug on their entwined hands, he slowly rises up to meet him as they ascend more and more into the air together, until they’re well above even the tallest of New York City’s buildings.

“Where would you like to go?” Erik asks, slowing them to a halt, the whole of New York stretched out below them in a portrait that Erik can’t help but marvel at for a long time.

Only Charles’ small reply of, “Beekman Tower, perhaps,” breaks him out of his slightly reverie.

He laughs, “That twisty residential building?”

“Third tallest building in New York,” Charles supplies helpfully with a nod.

“You sure do know a lot about New York.”

“I am a resident New Yorker, after all,” Charles says with a slight look of exasperation at Erik, but he’s smiling, so he knows better, and, with another tug of Charles’ hand, they begin their glide downwards.

It really makes Erik feel like a bird, flying about like this, weightless and high and free, with their arms outstretched like they’re Peter Pan and Wendy – and what a picture that is – flying onwards through New York. Better yet, it makes him feel _superhuman_ , flying past the Empire State building towards 8 Spruce Street.

At their destination, Erik touches down as gently as he can, stepping out of the air and onto the roof of Beekman Tower. He continues holding Charles’ hand as the other man makes his way to stepping down beside him, helping him down – legitimately helping him down, not just an excuse to continue holding his hand.

Once they’ve touched down completely though, Charles lets go of his hand to go running for the edge, peering over the edge of the building with all the enthusiasm of a small child that’s climbed to the Observation Decks of the Empire State Building, looming miles away but still somehow a behemoth. He’s not sure if that makes Erik his worried mother or what. He doesn’t try to think too hard about it. Instead, he steps neatly up beside Charles and climbing over to sit down right on the edge, his legs dangling downward to face seventy-six floors of air until they’d finally meet New York concrete.

“Now this is a view hardly anyone’s probably ever seen before, huh?” He asks Charles, the other man climbing over to sit beside him and dangle his feet off the edge as well.

After a long time, Charles smiles side-long at him. “The sun’s nearly setting,” he says, nodding at the far horizon, the building at just the right angle so they could look out to the west beyond and still see the Empire State Building to their left.

“We’ll stay for a while,” Erik says, so Charles doesn’t have to ask, and the soft quiet filled with cars and people far below dampened by distance is nearly all they hear in the wind. On his skin, Erik feels the wind but not the cold of it; he imagines that they would both be freezing right now if they could, Erik in only his hospital-issued shirt and trousers, Charles in his dress pants and a white collared shirt that just barely pokes out from beneath his sweater. He realises then that neither of them are wearing socks or shoes, and he presses his feet back against the twisting metal of the side of the building, feeling the slickness of it against his feel and the song of it in his body. In the distance, the sun is crawling its way down the horizon line. Somehow, the quiet between them isn’t uncomfortable.

 _It must be a miracle_ , Erik thinks his mother would say, _that you were ever comfortable around another human being at all, Erik._ Somehow, though, it sounds more like Raven’s voice, and the thought turns into a soft, _The only way it would be more romantic is if the stars were out._ All he can do to that is grimace at the idea of Charles’ little sister giving him advice on how to date Charles. What a fucking mess.

“I wish we could see the stars,” Charles says suddenly from beside him, and the way he seems to have read Erik’s mind – _I really hope he didn’t hear any of that_ – makes his chest flutter slightly, as well as putting a twist of fear deep into his gut. _Really hope he didn’t._ “Too bad we can’t see much from New York, huh? Too many clouds today, anyway. Real shame.”

Then there’s a small silence, in which Charles is smiling upwards at the sky and Erik is trying desperately to squash his paranoia about Charles reading his mind. There’s no way. The guy’s just a curious creature, that’s all.

Eventually, Erik stands up on the ledge, drawing Charles’ attention to him.

“Let’s go, then,” Erik suggests plainly.

“Go?” Charles sounds disappointed.

“Up,” Erik answers, because apparently they can only speak monosyllabically.

Laughing, Charles gets up – and immediately takes his hand. Erik suppresses a shiver, and feels tingly instead.

“Let’s,” Charles says, smiling just so at him.

“Let’s,” Erik agrees, pitch perfect as he smiles back at him, and, yeah, okay, the one-word answer thing really has to stop, so Erik gives a kick, and then they’re in the air again, rising even higher than before. Soon they’re breaking the cloud cover, and it’s clear that Charles can’t help but reaching out one hand for a touch.

“Strange,” he hears Charles say before those blue eyes flicker to him. “Like a soft, dense fog.” Somehow, the observation doesn’t shock Erik as much as it seems to shock Charles, and he lets out a laugh that rings through the mists of the clouds and into the open air once they break out of the cloud line, all sound damp and soft and distant, like it never really existed – like the whole of New York was just swallowed up.

Above them, the endless dark sky stretches on infinitely into black in the east, dotted with the pale white lights of stars and the flickering of planes, blended into the sun just now setting again in the horizon due to their sudden elevation.

Erik takes them back down a bit so they can walk amongst the cloud cover, Charles hardly seeming to notice the difference, too mesmerized by the stars twinkling from the east, until a plane rushes over their heads, the clouds chasing the tail end in wake, parting and streaming from the speed until it all settles back into the mass of cloud once more.

“Fascinating,” Charles breathes out beside him in a whimsical sigh, and he seems completely enraptured until Erik starts to pull back from him, their fingers disentangling, and Charles’ eyes snap to him, about to protest.

“You won’t fall,” Erik assures, completely letting his hand go, setting backwards, until Charles looks just like a head and shoulders and a torso just poking out of a dense fog, his blue eyes still bright as ever, even with the darkness all around them and the setting sun behind him casting a halo about his deep brown hair.

 _I’d never let you fall,_ he thinks, the thought itself unbidden and unwarranted and true.

Charles just blinks those blue doe-eyes at him and Erik continues taking steps backwards, backwards, backwards, smiling at Charles all the way, until the fog of cloud envelopes him, welcomes him in, wraps around him and swallows him whole.

Through the mist, he hears Charles calling his name, and he stays quiet, intent as he turns and backs up another few steps.

Then he sees Charles burst through the cloud wall, searching frantically for him. Resisting, the urge to laugh, he makes his way up behind him and grabs his sides, and Charles lets out a squeal like no other, swatting at him and calling him names when he realises that Erik intended to scare him and that he “scared him half to death,” and when he says that, Erik laughs until his sides hurt. Charles doesn’t seem to get the joke.

Eventually, they go back through the clouds again, and overhead is all black, the starry sky open wide to them, baring all for them to see. They stay there for some time, Charles naming one star and constellation after another and Erik occasionally reminding him that he can point out the Big Dipper. He’s not too sure where the Little Dipper is right now, but he’s got the Big one, and it’s the size that counts, right?

Neither he nor Charles have any idea what time it is when Charles finally takes his hand again for them to go back down. At this point, he’s not even sure it matters. He can’t recall which one of them first said that they should go. He’s not even sure that say much at all. They just went, simple as that, and, wordless, pushed Charles back into his body, the sinewy white threads connecting limb to limb and pulling him back in, and then laid down in bed quietly, Charles on his side of the bed and Erik on his own, both lying on their backs and staring upwards at the ceiling, the white blankness of it offering nothing but a place to put their own thoughts.

“You know,” Charles later whispers into the darkness of the room, “I’ve not had a friend in a very, very long time. Probably not in twelve years.”

There’s a long moment of silence there.

“Neither have I,” Erik says.

For another long while, neither of them say anything more, and Erik hears the sound of a drop of water landing on a pillow.

“I thought I was alone,” Charles murmurs, voice barely there, cracked as it is for the silent tears he’s shedding.

Erik reaches out to him, taking his hand and curling his fingers through Erik’s, even though they don’t quite fit and they phase through somewhat and raise gooseflesh up Charles’ forearm.

That doesn’t matter, though.

None of that matters.

“You’re not alone, Charles,” Erik whispers back to him. “You’re not alone.”

After that, the world fades out around them, into nothing but Charles’ breathing in sleep and the sounds of the city below.


	5. Chapter 5

As soon as he wakes up, he knows he’s not in Charles’ flat.

He draws in a breath and blows it out in a sigh, feeling the sunlight of wherever he is warm his skin and flare red in his vision through his closed eyelids. Everywhere smells fresh, like pines and aspens and the cold mountain air, and under his hands and his back and everywhere he feels soft green grass.

When he opens his eyes, all of this is confirmed.

Above him, the sun is shining high in the sky, casting its warmth and light all over. In front of him is a perfect line of trees, each tall and thin, with branches so thick and full of leaves that it’s hard to see anything beyond, only barely managing to get a glimpse of the occasional deep red trunk of one tree or another in the sea of deep green leaves and pine needles. Where the red trunks end on the red mulch, lush grass begins to form the clearing he’s lying in, then a huge ring of mushrooms after that, which he’s lying inside of, circles inside circles inside circles.

“Raven?” He calls as he sits up.

“Erik,” he hears from somewhere behind him. He swivels around to try and look for her and sees – a rock. A huge fucking rock. He can’t tell what colour it is at all since it’s shining with so many different ones, but he knows it’s a rock. A rock in the centre of a fairy circle of mushrooms in the centre of a circle of grass in the centre of a clearing in the centre of a forest, probably in the centre of a ring of mountains.

“You got something against straight lines?” He calls out, looking left and right to see if he can find her peering around the circle of the Rainbow Road’s official tribute to the heavenly plane.

“I like symmetry,” she calls back, and, oh, of course, she’s above him. Why didn’t he think of that? When he looks up, her face is all that’s peering over the rock, haloed by the sun behind her.

Suddenly, without warning, she jumps up, calling down to him, “Don’t you think I look like a fairy?” Now that he sees her, too, she doesn’t look much like Raven. She has dark hair that tumbles down her back, olive tan skin, and what closely resembles dragonfly wings sprouting from her shoulders, wearing what can only be described as a bikini, a skirt, and go-go boots, all in the same black as her hair. She looks, if anything, like a stripper. He’s not even sure she knows what a stripper is, and both this realization and her question only remind him of how young she is.

“I’d say you look more like an imp,” he laughs, and she makes a face and flutters down to him. When she lands, her hands go to her hips, her wings morphing into her shoulders until they look like nothing but tattoos stretching their way down her back and arms. Somehow, like when she was shimmering blues and fiery red hair, this doesn’t surprise him, either. “Did you call me here for a reason, or did you just want to show off?”

“Be serious, Erik,” Raven says as sternly as she can.

“Perfectly,” Erik nods, though his teasing is just covering up his climbing anxiety.

“I need you to answer me honestly now, Erik,” Raven says, and while Erik has no idea what she could possibly ask of him, the serious expression on her face makes him want to rush back to Charles to make sure he’s going, his worry like lightning that trembles from his core to his fingers and toes and back again.

He swallows thickly and says, “Yes,” because it’s all he can really say.

“Do you like my brother?”

Wait, what.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Erik stares down at her, but her expression doesn’t change. “You really _are_ a fucking imp,” he growls, resisting the urge to make a grab at her nose or pull one of her ears or give her a knuckle sandwich to the head, something to muss her up. She makes a face at him, and then he makes a reach for her tongue to show her who’s boss her. Just before he can get within reach though, she lets out a shriek and the ground opens up beneath him into an endless black abyss, sucking him in and pulling him down and he curses.

“Raven!” He calls out, the darkness sucking up his legs and torso. “Did you call me here for a reason or not?”

Above him, there’s a small, “Oh yeah,” and he sees the flickering of her skin as she peers over the edge of the hole she’s dug him into, the darkness suddenly receding very quickly from where it was at his chest and spitting him back out onto solid ground. As she flickers back into her young adult self, blonde hair and grey peacoat and skirt, he brushes off the last clinging bits of darkness from his trousers.

“A woman,” Raven says when he straightens up.

“A woman,” Erik repeats back to her, to which she nods and he makes a face at her to tell her to cut the prophecy of kings and noble bastard-born princes crap.

“I don’t remember her name,” Raven explains with tilt of her head and a cast-off expression. “Charles works for her, though. She’s tall, likes to wear one-inch heels, dark hair, fair skin…”

“Dr. MacTaggert,” Erik interrupts. Seems he’s picking up the Xavier habit.

“The one,” Raven agrees with a pointing finger to emphasize her… well, her point. “She’s worried about Charles.”

“Yes,” Erik nods. “She spoke to Charles about it yesterday.”

“Yes,” Raven assures, but somehow Erik isn’t sure at all that he likes where this is going. “She also spoke to someone else about it, too.”

“What? But that isn’t what she said – she seemed to think Charles was getting better!”

“Yes, she did say that,” Raven asserts. “But that isn’t what she thinks or did. She reported him to the higher ups for surveillance.”

“She reported him? But why?”

To that, Raven shrugs. “All I know is that she reported him, not much more. She’s just worried about him, that’s all.”

“Right,” Erik nods, letting the gears turn in his head. He isn’t completely sure how it relates entirely to the usual reasons Raven calls on him, but he supposes that this is considered saving Charles’ rear like all the others, even if for a different reason. “Right, well, I’ll tell Charles in the morning and have him call her and reassure her that he’s fine.”

“Good,” Raven says, and when did she get all the way up there? He then realises that it’s _him_ that’s moving, being pulled back into the ground again like before, darkness crawling up him and pulling him down. Raven is sending him back away to Earth.

“Keep an eye on her. Make sure she’s safe,” she adds, and before he can ask what she means, the darkness covers him up and he jolts awake in Charles’ bed.

“Ah, Erik, you’re awake,” he hears, and across the room, Charles is buttoning up his shirt. The sun has risen, shining clear through the window. He’s not sure what time it is, though. Charles looks rested, regardless of whatever time they must have made it to bed. “Something troubling you?”

“Hey, uh,” Erik sputters slightly, then realises he’s still sprawled up in a half-sit on the bed. He sits up fully as Charles is turning away to put on his sweater. “Do you know if Dr. MacTaggert is alright?”

“Moira?” Charles asks, his head popping out of his sweater so he can see himself in the mirror. “I would assume so, yes.” Charles’ eyes flit back to him momentarily before returning to the mirror to fix his collar, but Erik isn’t sure what he saw in them in his glimpse. “Why do you ask?”

Erik sighs slightly, licking his lips. “Just a bad feeling, that’s all.”

“Okay,” Charles says, though it’s rather unhelpful to him because there isn’t much there. “Let’s go, then.”

Once they finally get to the hospital, Charles immediately goes to Dr. MacTaggert’s office, as per Erik’s insistence.

“Weird,” Charles says in a whisper, almost as if he were talking to himself, turning back around to Erik, making Erik tilt his head slightly in question, knowing Charles will continue. “Moira’s usually in.” He’s beginning to seem just as worried as Erik, and shoots him a glance that says as much before turning and calling out, “Hank!”

There’s a slight scuffling noise, and then the sound of a door opening, and one Dr. McCoy’s head comes poking out from a door down the hall.

“Hank,” Charles greets him, striding down the hall to meet him as the other man stands up to his full lanky potential, towering about Charles by good half foot. “Have you seen Moira today yet? She’s usually in by now.”

“No, I haven’t, sorry, Charles,” Hank says, shaking his head just slightly so his glasses don’t slide down his nose. “You can go try nurse Salvador, though. She always knows who’s here and who’s not.”

With a nod, Charles thanks him and heads off down the hall.

“Nurse Salvador?” Erik asks Charles once they’re in a relatively quiet area with no one around to hear them.

“Yes,” Charles says, after taking a moment’s care to make sure they are out of anyone’s range of hearing as well. “She’s been a nurse here since I was a boy. She even took care of my sister when she was sick,” Charles explains to him quietly, and he can see the sadness in Charles’ eyes at the mention of Raven. It’s the first time Charles has willingly said anything about her, not that Erik has ever brought her or anyone else in the conversation topic of _family_ up. “She’s been here so long that she just seems to know where everyone is all the time, and hopefully she’ll know where Moira is.”

With that, they continue down the hall, turning the corner until they get to the front desk with the nurse’s station. Behind one counter, amongst nurses bustling about, is a woman Erik has never really noticed before. Under the sleeves of her scrubs, Erik can see the faint lines of a tattoo – dragonfly’s wings.

“Mrs. Salvador!” Charles calls cheerily, making the nurse turn around in her seat. When she turns fully, Erik catalogues all of her – her tan skin, her dark hair, her cataloguing eyes with crows’ feet in the corners, her worn scrubs, and even her nametag that reads _Angel Salvador_. Her tattoo shines in the light, and it clicks.

_“Don’t you think I look like an angel?”_

His heart clenches.

Angel Salvador.

Did Raven think of this woman at all as her guardian angel?

“Charles,” she greets, her smile soft, barely there but happy to see him. “Good to see you, boy. Anything I can do for you?”

“Yes, actually,” Charles smiles. “I was hoping you’d seen Moira today?”

“I haven’t, actually,” she says, her eyebrows knitting together slightly. “I haven’t seen her since – well, she was here all night filling out paperwork for something, but once she was done, she left in quite a rush to I don’t know where. Probably left for home, I imagine.”

“Thank you,” Charles says with a wide smile. “You’re an angel, you know,” he adds, and she smiles wide and smug at the terrible pun-compliment mix.

“I know,” she says with a slight shrug before she waves him off back to work.

“I think we should check on her,” Erik insists, and so Charles pulls out his cellphone and flips it open and – flips it open? Really, Charles, update your technology once in a while, for goodness’ sake, this isn’t 2006.

There’s a few long moments of Charles holding the phone up to his ear, clearly growing steadily more and more worried until his eyebrows are furrowed, his arms are crossed, and his foot is tapping restlessly on the floor.

Suddenly there’s a _snap_ of Charles’ phone shutting, a glance in Erik’s direction that screams about her lack of picking up, and then they’re both out the door.

—

They somehow make it to Dr. MacTaggert’s flat in what must be record time, having skipped the subway in preference for running the few blocks to her building, and when they’re both in the elevator to ride up to her floor, Charles is panting just slightly (Erik likely would be as well, if he – you know – actually had to _breathe_ and all).

Once the elevator doors open, there’s a slight scramble towards her door, but just as Charles raises his fist to knock on the door, it opens under his hand, and he nearly ends up knocking on Dr. MacTaggert’s face.

“Charles,” she says, sounding stunned. “It’s always good to see you, but… what are you doing here?”

“Oh,” Charles says _oh-_ so intelligently. “I was just… I had a bad feeling, and you didn’t pick up your phone, so I…”

“Did you run all the way from the hospital?” She asks, side-eyeing him and his white coat suspiciously.

“Well, maybe, yes,” Charles says a little breathlessly. “I was just worried.”

“You could have tried my home phone,” She begins, but then shakes her head, her eyebrows together as she looks at him seriously. “Look, Charles, I’m really worried about you. Are you sure you’re alright?”

“What?” Charles shakes his head. “Yes, yes, I’m fine, I assure you, I’m—”

“Charles, I won’t lie to you,” Dr. MacTaggert says, shaking her head and effectively off as she crosses her arms over her white lab coat. “You know what I do is in your best interest, right?”

“Yes,” Charles says, but it’s more a question-statement and a _please continue_ than an agreement.

“Last night I wrote up the recommendation for your current patient Erik Lehnsherr to be switched out of your care,” she continues, and Charles just stares back at her wordlessly, his mouth slightly agape with confusion. “I also recommended that you take a short leave of absence – a vacation, if you will, for your own good.”

“Do you not think I can do it?” Charles asks after a long time, sounding rather dumb-founded, though slowly the anger boils its way into his speech. “Do you not think that I can handle this?”

“Charles, please don’t misunderstand me,” she says, his expression switching from _serious boss figure_ to _concerned friend._ “You of all people that if you have a number one advocate that it’s me. I just want what’s best for you, and I think that might be it right now, just to take a while to relax and be on your own and then get back into the swing of things. I’m just worried about you, that’s all.”

“I told you last night that there’s nothing to worry about,” Charles begins in protest.

“I know, I know,” Dr. MacTaggert sighs. “But after we spoke last night, I went around and asked the nurses that helped you if they thought you were okay, and while most of you seemed to think you were doing better… well, a lot of them mentioned that they thought you were spending too much time with one of your patients – Erik Lehnsherr, that is, your coma patient. They thought you were losing sleep over it, and one of them even overheard you about a week ago reassure the parents that he was going to be okay, and you know as well as I do what something like that means for a doctor, and what it _does_ to a doctor. It means that—”

“I know what it means!” He cuts in angrily, voice a shout that echoes down the hall.

“Then tell me what it means, Charles!” Dr. MacTaggert shouts. “Tell me what it means.”

There’s a strange moment of silence there and Charles’ expression falls. The hairs on the back of Erik’s neck stand up and gooseflesh travels its way down his back.

“It means that the doctor has gotten too close to the patient,” Charles answers, in the same way that a reprimanded student would answer the question of a loathed teacher. “It means that if the patient dies, the doctor will blame themselves.”

“Yes,” Dr. MacTaggert agrees. “Don’t you see, Charles? I can’t have that happen to you. You’re are best and our brightest, and I can’t keep having you feed this man’s parents false hope about their son’s recovery—”

“It’s not false hope!” Charles blurts suddenly, surprising them all. It’s clear from even Charles’ expression that he didn’t think before he answered, his expression falling into realization.

“Please, Charles,” Dr. MacTaggert says, placing her hands gently on his shoulders, her expression fond and concerned and all the things a friend is. “Please, just take this time for yourself.”

“Okay,” Charles agrees in a soft voice. “Okay. I’ll go.”

“Thank you,” Dr. MacTaggert says, pulling him in a quick embrace. Charles manages to weakly hug her back. “Just take the week for yourself, okay? Go somewhere, relax – just for a little while.”

“I will,” Charles says with a soft smile as they pull apart and say goodbye.

Erik doesn’t say anything.

Erik doesn’t say anything even when they get back to Charles’ apartment, half for lack of knowing what to say, and half for not wanting to say what he knows he has to. It isn’t even until well past nightfall that either of them finally speak a word to the other, and when they do it’s Erik that breaks the silence.

“Should I leave?” He asks, but, for all it’s worth, it feels like he’s only asking the night air, because all Charles does is look at him for a long while before his eyes fall away contemplatively. He doesn’t want to ask again.

After a long time, Charles finally whispers back, soft and almost broken, “I don’t know,” and that’s all there is for a long time.

Even later, Erik asks, “Do you want me to leave?”

“No,” comes the answer, sooner than he expected.

“But you think I should,” Erik finishes for him.

There’s a slight delay, and Erik knows what that means, and a soft “yes” is the answer that comes, just as he expected.

Erik stands up. Charles’ eyes follow him up, locked on Erik’s.

“Then I suppose I’ll leave,” he says, but doesn’t really move much more than that.

On the table between them, Charles’ phone rings.

“Please excuse me,” he says, his eyes still on Erik’s before he finally averts his gaze to answer his phone. With a glance at the screen, he shots Erik a confused expression and says, “It’s Moira.”

He flips his phone open and presses it to his ear, answering, “Charles here.”

When Charles’ expression falls, Erik knows exactly why.

The voice on the line isn’t Moira MacTaggert. It isn’t even female.

It’s Kurt Marko.


	6. Chapter 6

The room is quiet. It’s all too quiet.

Charles is sitting with his head in his hands, Erik leaning forward to rest his forearms on his knees. The phone lays still between them again on the table.

“A ransom,” Erik murmurs.

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“All of the money my mother left me. He doesn’t want the estate.”

Erik swallows loud in the silence.

“That’s the problem, really,” Charles begins to explain. “I don’t have _all_ of the money my mother left me when she died. I used a good chunk of it to finish paying my way through university and medical school. I didn’t have to stay in school long, but that’s still a few hundred thousand dollars gone, and he wants every penny I’ve spent of it in full.”

“In exchange for her life,” Erik says.

“In exchange for Moira’s life, yes,” Charles nods, scrubbing a trembling hand down his face.

There’s silence again for a while.

“How long do you have?”

“About a week,” Charles answers. “They want the payment before I go back to the hospital.”

More silence.

“You know,” Charles huffs out with a weary laugh, eyes in his lap. “I always thought that Kurt that was the reason my mother died. Obviously I didn’t voice my opinion at the time because I was just a teenager with little to no evidence and a bad relationship with my step-father, so what did I know?” He’s quiet for a moment, a harsh smile on his face. “Now I know, I guess,” he finishes, and that’s the last fucking straw for Erik.

“We’re going to get her back.”

That makes Charles looks up.

“What – by paying the ransom? I can’t do that, and you know that we can’t involve the police or they’ll—”

“No,” Erik shakes his head, cutting Charles off, voice stern and unbending. “I’ll go find her and we’ll rescue her ourselves.” Charles just _looks_ at him. “No, I’m serious. I can go in – they’ll never even know I was there.”

“So you can go in,” Charles puzzles out, “But how are you going to get _her_ out?”

To be honest, he hadn’t thought of that.

“Just let me try, Charles,” he pleads – or, _would_ be pleading, if he were the type to do that. “Right now it’s the only shot we have at getting her back.”

For a long time, Charles is quiet once more, until he finally nods his head.

“Okay,” he agrees, but the word is quaking and afraid. It’s enough to make Erik reach out and gently touch his fingers to Charles’ hand. He can’t quite feel the touch but a faint tingling sensation, and he’s not even sure that Charles can feel it either, but right now he’s hoping that it’s the thought that counts.

—

It isn’t all that hard to find the cars tailing Charles. As soon as Charles steps out to get groceries, a car pulls out of the lot and follows ‘discreetly’ behind Charles. Well, it’s fairly discreet to Charles as they remain a block or two behind, but Erik can feel the guns at their hips even when they’re more than five blocks away. Guns are an easy thing to find in a crowd, even in a crowded city like New York. It also makes it easier that they have a rifle in the backseat, and the black SUV doesn’t exactly make them inconspicuous.

He doesn’t tell Charles that the car is there following him, but he’s pretty sure that he gets the idea to carry on like normal when Erik nods at him and then wanders off in search of aforementioned vehicle. Not that aforementioned vehicle is all that hard to find, what with all the damned ammunition they’ve got loaded into it; you’d think they were trying to take down the fucking Death Star, not a 5’7 doctor who can’t even bench his own weight at the gym.

But, really, that’s how Erik ends up sat between two large, sweaty men in the back of an SUV, sitting rather awkwardly on top of a rifle. The car ride is uncomfortable to say the least.

Unfortunately, the car ride is really just a fucking bore. Once he’s in, he has to sit another _six_ _hours_ before the goons fucking radio in for the next shift to come and take their place, and by about the third hour he had the rifle pointed where a rifle mostly definitely should _not_ be pointed at a man’s body, and unable to move it without catching someone’s attention.

Eventually another car – another black SUV, really? Couldn’t they be a little more original? – does come to swap out with them, and from there it’s a mess of being stuff in the infamous New York traffic to make their way out of the city and then another hour or so to get up into what Erik thinks might be Westchester county. The houses have slowly turned from… well, you know, _houses_ to manors to _literal mansions_. Like the kind that only occurs in the Great Gatsby or some shit like that. But at least the roads are paved, even though a lot of the land is barren and likely owned by rich-as-all-fuck billionaires. What a fucking choice for a heist HQ. Personally, Erik was expecting secret warehouses hidden under the Hudson River loaded with submarines, which doesn’t really make sense since the ransom is money, but this place doesn’t make much more sense, either.

The car then turns into a gate, to which they have to be _radioed in by security._ He’s pretty sure it isn’t real security, just more goons dressed up like it. He does make a note of the address – 1407 Graymalkin Lane – before they’re let in through the gate, up the long road littered with fountains and cut-into-shapes bushes, and allowed to park at the front entrance of the mansion, which really does _not_ make sense. Why would a so-rich-I-pay-people-to-wipe-my-ass person that lives in a house like this need an inheritance like Charles’? Sure, maybe he could buy another estate, but what the hell would even be the point when you already own an estate this big? Fucking avaricious Great Gatsby fucks. They don’t even make sense.

Regardless, Erik follows them out of the car and into the house, with its stone walls and spires and lookout spots and shit.

As soon as he steps inside though, a wave of _familiar_ washes over him, making him shiver full-body. He feels eerily like he’s been here before somehow.

Surprisingly, there isn’t anyone that comes out to meet them and let them in, and they all go separate directions once they’re inside, leaving Erik to fend for himself, and, in a place like this, is completely un-fucking-helpful.

For a good two hours or so, Erik is left wandering around the mansion, until he finally manages to stumble through the doors of a room that he thinks might be someone’s study – well, clearly _is_ someone’s study, seeing as he’s sitting in the chair behind the desk over by the fireplace. Sitting in the chair is a large, built man in a dark grey suit, sporting a beard that’s someone like Tony Stark gone wrong, not that Tony isn’t all kinds of wrong in and of himself anyway. There’s streaks of grey running through his hair, very unlike all of the other men he’s seen wandering about, and he looks kind of important, so Erik sits in one of the chairs and waits. It’s quite a wait, too. Nearly another hour before there’s finally a knock at the door, and the man at the desk bellows for him to come in.

“Any answer from our young doctor yet?” The man at the desk asks, his voice as big as he is. Erik isn’t sure whether he’s referring to Charles or to Moira.

“No, sir – he hasn’t accepted or declined yet. No movement that we can see aside from daily rituals.” Ah, well, that answers his question nicely. From the man at the desk, there’s a hum as he laces his fingers together across his mouth contemplatively.

“And how is the girl? Not too broken, is she?” Desk man asks.

“No, sir.”

“Good, good,” he hums. “If little Charles doesn’t accept within two days, make a video and break her legs for him. Two more days and you cut them off. Arms follow – one a day.”

The metal all across the room shivers. Neither men notice.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Run along, now.”

With that, the man leaves, and Erik follows, leaving the man he assumes to be Kurt Marko behind.

The man eventually leads him into a long dining room, the table littered with papers and charts and maps and photos, all of which he assumes have a little too much to do with Charles. He can see his eyes in a full-colour still from across the room. Somehow, he thinks, it might be the only thing stopping him from caving in the support beams and melting all electronics in the room. That and the fact that who he came here for is still locked away in here somewhere. Hopefully. There’s a chance she might not even be here.

That thought gives him pause.

From across the room he hears a shout of, “You two! Go check on the girl. Make sure she’s… comfortable.” Two men rise from the table, so Erik follows them and thinks about killing them with their own guns. They lead him out of the room, down a long hallway, and down the staircase at the end, down and down until they reach something that only serves to remind Erik of a Cold War bunker. There are even heavy steel doors that lock with an alarm. Once inside, neither of the men having donned a mask, it’s exactly what Erik thought it was – a Cold War bunker, the walls made of concrete and more steel, both so thick he isn’t even sure the Hulk could smash through.

They’re lead in at the east end, which is lined with dozens of storage containers and crates and _guns_. Lots and lots of guns.

At the other end is Moira.

She’s tied down to the chair she’s sitting in, a gag in her mouth, blindfold absent but clearly once having been there. She appears relatively unharmed, aside from a few bruises and scrapes that were likely the result of a fight. There’s a large bruise along her temple, likely from being smashed with the butt of a gun in order to be taken out. Holding her in place all over are chains, from her crossed ankles to her chest, all meant so that she can’t try and cut through. There would literally be no way through those if they didn’t have the key.

Or, alternatively, metal-manipulating powers. Now how convenient is that?

Upon their arrival at the west end of the bunker, Moira finally looks up at them, shooting daggers with her glare. Tough girl. Erik’s thankful for that, because, at the moment, he isn’t sure there’s much that he can do without alerting everyone that _something_ is going on.

“How’s the little princess doing?” One of the men teases as he kneels down beside her. Moira just continues glaring at him sharply.

He doesn’t seem to notice his gun twitching at his hip.

Erik clenches his fists hard in order to calm himself and leave. He needs to tell Charles. They have to get her out, and soon.

—

He makes the flight back to Charles’ flat as quick as he possibly can, but even then it’s a half an hour or so – it’s hard to tell time when your watch phases through you – and that’s half an hour of time wasted that they could be using to rescue Moira.

As soon as Charles’ flat is within view, he forces all of his power into going faster, and ends up barreling in through his bedroom window and nearly phasing through his opposite bedroom wall and into the hallway in a rather botched attempt at stopping himself. It’s also hard to get purchase when you’re a ghost and your feet phase through the floor.

“Charles!” He clambers upright, and across the room Charles is nearly halfway out of his seat with shock.

“Erik!” He shouts back, half-mimicking Erik’s call to him. “Erik, are you alright? What’s happened?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he scrambles, making his way to Charles at his bedside. “We should really go. I mean, as soon as we can. I can get her out no problem, so as long as you have a car ready we can hop in and then we can easily—”

“Erik, Erik, slow down, Quicksilver,” Charles shakes his head, raising his hands to attempt to touch his arm reassuringly. “Please, explain a little more slowly.”

“I know where they’re keeping her,” Erik explains, trying to go a little more slowly but huffing with the effort – ironic, considering he doesn’t have to breathe. “They’re out in Westchester, so we can—”

“Westchester?” Charles asks incredulously. “Where exactly in Westchester?”

“Uh – 1407 Graymalkin Lane,” Erik repeats from memory. “That’s where they—”

“My estate,” Charles cuts him off. “They’re in… my estate? Erik, that’s where I grew up, are you sure that’s where they are?”

“What?” Erik asks. This is new information. “That was… that was _your_ estate? The hardships you must have endured, Charles.”

“Yes, that is _my_ estate,” Charles asserts. “They’re in _my_ estate, if the address is what you said it is.”

“It is, I’m sure of it,” Erik nods. “Did you know that you have a Cold War bunker in the basement?”

“Yes,” Charles answers. “My grandfather was a very cautious man. How did you—that’s where they’re keeping Moira, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Charles curses. Erik’s not sure he’s ever heard him curse before. “That’s a room wired to the alarm system – we open that door and they’ll know immediately.”

“Not if I melt the alarm system,” Erik suggests.

“Melt… the alarm system,” Charles parrots back questioningly.

“That’s my power,” Erik says in a breathless sort of way. “Ghosts – we, uh, we each get powers, right? And that’s my power.”

“Your power is… to melt alarm systems?” Charles asks with a cock of his head.

“What? No, no! I control metal, Charles.”

For Charles, it seems to click right then. “The pen!” He exclaims. “You were the one – with the pen that night!”

“What? Oh, yes! Yes, sorry, I didn’t exactly have excellent control at the time.”

“That’s alright,” Charles waves it off. “So, you control metal, yes? Does that mean you can, ah… feel it, too?”

“Yes, yes, definitely,” Erik replies. “I could feel the gun that day in the subway – I stopped him from shooting you, that one man.”

“Ah, I see,” Charles nods. “That’s very convenient! You know, because people want to kill me for my inheritance and all. Please remind me later to remove the entire Marko family from my will.”

“Why were they even in your will in the first place?” Erik asks.

“Lack of clear thought and time,” Charles explains, running a hand through his hair, then he suddenly seems to remember the gravity of the situation. “Right then! Moira. Tell me about where she is.”

“The west end of the bunker,” Erik says. “When the two men I went in with checked on her, she was okay, just a few cuts and bruises. But Marko said that if you don’t accept the offer within two days, then they’ll break her legs. Two more, and they’ll cut them off, so we have to act fast is we want to get her out. The two guys didn’t wear masks when they went in, either, and she wasn’t blindfolded, which means she knows their faces.”

“Is that relevant?” Charles questions.

“Yes,” Erik answers. “It means that when you pay up, they’re going to kill her anyway. She’s knows who they are and what they look like – she can easily rat them out if they get away, especially because she was a hostage. It also means they’ll kill you once they get what they want.”

“How do you even know all this, Erik? Aren’t you an engineer?”

“I watch a lot of crime TV,” Erik shrugs. “I saw it once on _Burn Notice._ ”

“Right,” Charles nods skeptically. “You have too much time on your hands, Erik.”

“ _Anyway_ , there are men all over the estate,” Erik continues. “They even have security guards posing out front of the gate. Most of them are located in the dining room – there were about fifteen when I went in.”

“Which dining room?”

“You have _more than one_ dining room?” To that, Charles just shrugs casually. Erik gets a strange urge to tickle him until he screams. “Whatever, Charles. Can we get her out?”

From where Charles is, he hears a contemplative sigh. “We might be able to, yes. I know a few back entries from exploring as a child with Raven, but we’ll have to play it very carefully, my friend.”

“That – that I can do, Charles.”

—

As soon as they’re out of the building, Marko’s goons are right on their tail, not but a few blocks behind at all times. When they turn off into the subway, the SUV pulls over and two people hop out of the vehicle, one plump woman and one stick-thin man. Under normal circumstances, they wouldn’t seem suspicious at all, except for the fact that Erik can feel the guns at their hips.

“They’re here,” Erik warns Charles. “Make absolutely no acknowledgement of them, and, whatever you do, don’t run. You need to be able to blend in, and though running might help you get away faster, it also makes you easy to spot.”

“See that on crime TV?” Charles whispers teasingly as they make their way down to wait for the train.

“Hey, don’t knock _White Collar_ ‘til you try it.” Erik smirks. “Now, wait for the train.”

Within a few minutes, the train roars its arrival, and Erik says (shouts) to him, “Don’t get up for the train immediately. Act as if you’re waiting for the next line. Check your watch even.” Charles does as he’s told, checking his watch. Behind them, Marko’s tags look rather convinced, preferring to stay behind for a moment and acting like they aren’t watching.

“Now, Bond,” Erik says quickly, “Get on the train.”

So Charles jumps.

One of his sleeves ends up getting caught in the door as it closes, but the train jerks into life regardless and continues down the track. Outside the window, Erik can already see the two attempting to radio in his escape back to the SUV, to send out more tails on him, probably one at every stop they can manage.

With a tug, Charles manages to wring the corner of his sleeve from the door, and moves to take a pole with Erik. Almost without his consent, Erik’s hand moves closer to his on the pole.

“Are you okay?” Erik asks. “Blink once for yes, twice for no.” Beside him, Charles blinks once. “Good. Hopefully we won’t have to outrun them again.” To that, Charles looks right at him and blinks once more very deliberately, and Erik chuckles.

A few stops later, Erik ushers Charles off the train, and they head up the walk to head a few blocks down, turning into a car park next to a tall apartment building. “Second floor,” Erik says, leading the way until they reach a Lexus, which Erik pats the boot of. “Lexus LS 460,” he says with a proud nod.

“How could you even afford to buy this sort of vehicle – in New York City, of all places?” Charles asks with a confused tilt of his head.

“I work for Tony Stark,” Erik says with a shrug.

“Impressive,” Charles comments with raised brows and a nod.

“Thank you,” Erik acknowledges, circling the car until they’re both at the driver’s side door. “Bend down and feel along the frame around the tire – I’ve taped a spare key there.” Beside him, Charles easily squats down – damn, his _check out Charles’ ass_ plan has been foiled – and feels along the edge for the key, peeling it off when he finds it and standing back up with a small “eureka!”

“Yeah, yeah, boy genius, get in the car,” Erik teases as he circles around to the passenger side and phases right in to sit on the seat. Across from him, Charles slides in as well, quickly starting the car and moving them along and out of the garage. “I assume you know how to get there from here?”

“You’ve assumed correctly, seeing as that _is_ my house,” Charles says as he pulls out onto the street.

“Good. Take us there as quickly as you can, then.”

—

It takes them an hour and a half to get to the estate then, but only because Charles drives very seriously (read: like an old person, to which he took offence when Erik commented, saying, “I just like to be safe.”). When they get there, then sun has set, leaving the sky dark and endless, the stars only slightly visible out here. Just before they would have reached the estate, as planned, Charles turns a sudden turn up through the trees, making Erik immediately regret letting Charles use his car to get here.

“Please don’t ruin my car,” Erik pleads.

“I’m not,” Charles affirms with a nod. “The land is fairly flat, it’ll be fine!”

Erik’s not as convinced, but he gives up and slinks down more in the seat so they can get this done and over with.

Once Charles is in position, Erik phases neatly out of the car, only poking his head back in to say, “I shouldn’t be more than ten minutes. If anyone suspects anything and you see someone coming, leave immediately. Do you hear me? _Immediately_. Moira and I will find you later.” To that, Charles agrees, so Erik pushes off the ground and makes his way towards the house as quickly as he can, the way dark under the canopy of leaves that surrounds all of the estate.

He makes sure to find an easy exit before entering the mansion at all, trying to find the shortest route to the staircase that leads down to the bunker below. He finds a quick route in through the back door and follows it quickly, easily passing by two armed men looking through papers on his way. He makes sure to raise his arms so he passes through both them just to make them sneeze out of spite. “Fuckers deserve more than that,” he curses as he makes his way down to the bunker.

Once inside, he’s glad to see that no one’s guarding the door. Probably because… well, logically speaking, they wouldn’t have to. Erik normally would assume they wouldn’t have to, either.

He slips easily in through the door, phasing right through even that steel contraption, and once he’s inside, he looks immediately to see if Moira’s okay.

“Oh fuck,” he curses.

There, on the west end, even through the low light of the bunker, it’s clear that they pushed Moira around some more than when he’d last been here. As he gets closer, he can see more and more bruises purpling along her fair skin, the rips in her tights and along the edges of her clothes. There’s a massive cut along her forehead, the blood having run down her face, clotting along her eyebrow and along her eye, dark and dried all over. He shouldn’t have left. _Fuck,_ he shouldn’t have _left_ —

In front of him, Moira jerks awake with a whine. Her eyes focus on him.

Immediately, she begins to struggle against her binding chains, beginning to sob over her gag, trying to turn away from him.

 _Well, at least she can see me_ , he thinks. _That might makes things easier._

 _Then again_ , a dark part of his mind supplies, _it might also make things more complicated depending on what they’ve done to her._

Carefully, he raises his hands into the air slowly to show that he’s not carrying anything – he’s not armed and he means her no harm. Slowly, very, very slowly, he takes a few steps forward, just so that at least his face comes into the light and she can see that it’s him. When she notices, her eyes go wide as they make the connection of _who_ exactly he is, and though she stops crying, she’s still shaking and breathing heavily, making muffled noises under the gag.

“Moira,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “I’m not here to hurt you, I promise. I’m here to help. I know this is going to see really, really crazy, but please just trust me right now. I’ll answer any questions you have later. But right now, please just let me get you out of here alive so that I can answer them, okay?” Charles can never say ever again that watching a lot of crime TV doesn’t help. “Please don’t nod, just in case - blink once for yes or twice for no.”

After a long moment, across from him, she blinks once.

“Thank you,” he says, slowly lowering his hands. She watches them go down, then her eyes flicker back up to him. “Are there any cameras in this room? Can they see us?” She blinks twice. “Good, that will make this easier.” He pauses slightly. “Can I come untie you?” Immediately she blinks once, so he steps forward, circles around behind her slowly, and lifts his hand to touch the metal chains binding her to the chain. From back here, he can see that she has a massive bloody wound on the back of her head, and he winces. There’s a chance she may have been concussed or blacked out. Shit.

He shakes his head, giving the chains a jerk, and under his hand they snap loudly before slinking down under gravity, the one broken link sliding off the chain and down onto the concrete ground. Once the chains are slackened, Moira wriggles, but Erik warns her, “Please just hold still, okay? I’ll take the chains off for you.”

With a few shakes of his hand, all of the chains slide down to the ground as soundlessly as Erik can let them go, and Erik advises her to “Just go slowly,” and, per his instruction, she does so, slowly moving her arms to remove her gag as Erik walks to in front of her to focus on removing the chains binding her feet together.

“You’re the coma patient,” she says, her throat sounding dry and gritty, probably from dehydration.

“Indeed I am, but I’ll explain all of that later,” Erik nods as the chains slide away from her feet “Do you think you can stand?”

“I don’t know,” she says, moving to stand up. As she slowly does so, they hear her hip audibly pop, but, other than that, it appears she can stand mostly on her own, aside from a slight pain in her ankle that might make her limp. “Can we please just leave now?”

“Yes, absolutely,” Erik says. “But, like I said, some weird stuff is gonna happen, so please just go with it for now, okay? Especially if you want to get out of here – Charles and I both want you to. I’ll answer any questions you have later to the best of my ability. For now, try not to talk too much, keep your voice down if you do, and cover your ears whenever I tell you to.”

“Okay,” Moira murmurs, and Erik’s really glad for the lack of reluctance from her.

“Good, thank you,” he says, and, with that, they head for the east end. As they approach the other side, Erik searches the crates with his powers for a pistol, drawing it out and to him with his power, taking it in hand. The ‘taking in hand’ bit is mostly for show, just so it will look slightly less confusing to Moira, whose eyes are already wide. “I’ll explain later, I promise,” he tells her, and then he nods to the door. “Stay behind me. Cover your ears, just in case.”

Raising his arm – and forthwith the pistol, loaded and ready – he focuses more of his power on the door, trying to melt a whole through the middle that they can crawl through. The steel melts and wraps with his thoughts and commands, shaping to form a hole wide and tall enough for them to crouch and go through.

“Stay close,” he tells Moira, then goes through the hole, peeking out first with his pistol to make sure the coast is clear, only waving her out after he does so. They slowly make their way up the stairs, the only sound around being the soft sounds of Moira breathing through her bloodied nose and the gentle clicks of her shoes on the stairs.

At the top of the stairs, Erik motions for her to stay still, looking around the corners to make sure no one is coming, reaching out with his powers to check for sure. He feels a mass of a guns in the dining room, the rest upstairs and laying still by beds and nightstands, two set outside the door of the study he was in earlier that day where Marko was.

“Let’s go,” Erik says, looking back to Moira, and she nods back at him. They ascend the last of the stairs and creep slowly down the hall, Moira’s shoes giving small clicks still as she moves.

“Take your shoes off,” Erik advises, looking back at her in the dark.

“What?”

“Take your shoes off,” he says, nodding down at them. “They make a lot of noise, that’s all. You’ll be able to move better, too.” Semi-reluctantly, she does so, and they move more quickly through the hall, her feet silent on the various tile patters and wood paneling.

They make it quickly to the back door Erik came in, and once outside, they dash down the steps and onto the grass on the side, making a break for the trees.

“Stay as low as you can,” Erik tells her before they begin running for the trees. From there, they just keep running, as fast and as far as they can, until Moira trips over the roots of an overgrown tree and goes toppling to the ground with a shriek, a combination of her ankle having been twisted in the fall and having landed on various bruises and cuts.

“ _Shit,_ ” Erik curses, bending down to her, the pistol dropping to the ground and off to the side. “Shit, are you okay? Can you walk?”

“I don’t know,” she says, shrugging widely and shaking her head frantically. “Oh god, I don’t know…”

“Alright,” Erik says, nodding. “Alright, just wait here, okay? I’ll be one minute.” Just before he turns to leave, he turns back to the gun and gives it to her. “Take this, okay? Please just take it. If anyone comes here from the direction of the house, shoot them. Can you do that for me? I’ll be right back, I promise. Just one minute.” With that finished, Moira nodding her way through his speech, he turns and pushes as hard as he can to make it to Charles.

Once he’s at the car, Charles rolls down the window upon seeing his figure in the distance. “Where’s Moira?” He asks once he’s close enough for his voice to reach him and not carry too far.

“She fell and twisted her ankle and I can’t get her,” Erik says, shaking his head.

“Shit,” Charles curses, scrambling to unbuckle his seatbelt. “Bloody, bleeding, buggering _shit_ ,” he says as he scrambles out of the car, and, fuck, if they weren’t in the middle of a very life-or-death situation, Erik might have actually been a little bit turned on right now. But now’s not the time, and that’s completely inappropriate anyway. “You stay here, I’ll go get her and be right back,” Charles says, and before he can even agree, he takes bolting off into the trees.

With nothing left to do but sit and wait, Erik phases in through the car door and sits down in the passenger’s side to do just that.

It’s another five minutes or so before Charles comes hobbling out of the trees with Moira in tow, her arm laid over his shoulder so he can help carry her weight off of her twisted ankle. With his powers, Erik easily opens the backdoor and Charles sets Moira down inside, strapping her in quickly. Erik just as easily shuts the door when Charles forgets to in his rush back to the driver’s seat, turning the engine on and gunning them the fuck out of there.

They peel back out onto the road and turn to head back to the city, and once they do, Charles sighs heavily. “Thank goodness,” he says, back to his regular, non-cursing self. “Thank goodness we’re out of there now.”

“Out of the frying pan, into the fire,” Moira says rather ominously from the backseat, but she sounds rather near tears than before, and has yet to ask Erik a single question, mostly, he assumes, from shock. When Erik turns to look at her, though, she’s turned around in the seat, her eyes trained off into the lights of another car in the distance as it turns out onto the road. As it turns out of the _estate._

“Shit,” Erik curses. “Charles, gun it. Speeding would actually be very nice right about now.”

“What?” Charles asks, but once glance into the rear view mirror has him pushing the speed pedal almost to the floor, the car jerking slightly as it catches up with the sudden pressure on the gas. Soon, they’re speeding down the road at nearly eighty miles an hour, but even still the car behind them is catching up, and they’re both still gaining speed.

“Shit,” Erik hisses once again, wanting desperately to pound his fist on the dashboard to help relieve some of the anxiety. Then he realises where they are, very near the edge of the city. “Fuck, Charles – Charles, turn off here and try and lose them in the neighbourhood!” Charles tries to take the turn as neatly as possible – which really ends up with them all smashing harshly into the window as he nearly flips the car, but then they speed off into the neighbourhood, just on the outskirts of the city enough that no one is around but enough that there might be a chance that they could lose their tail.

But, no. Of course not. The other car turns right in after them, their lights speeding around the corner just as they did, unsteady and just as fast. And, of course, that’s when they begin to pull the guns out and start firing at their car.

“Fuck! Always with the fucking guns,” Erik shouts, and searches their car with his power for the pistol he gave Moira earlier, but to no avail. “Moira, where’s the gun? Where’d you put my gun?”

“I lost it, I lost it! I’m sorry!” Moira sobs back at him, letting out a scream as a bullet breaks the back windshield, the glass splintering everywhere. Charles tries to take another corner, then immediately another, nearly throwing their car over again, but it doesn’t matter, the Marko’s car have them for every move they make.

Erik scrambles his way into the backseat beside Moira, telling her to keep down as he raises his hands and focuses his powers on the Marko’s car, trying to focus all of his will onto the car behind them, searching out the metal he finds there and trying desperately to shove it all together, to just _destroy_ it, just turn it somewhat, to find the steering wheel and just _push_ —

Suddenly, the wheels of the car tailing them give out, and the car swerves off the road, smashing sideways into a mailbox, sending letters flying out in all directions and leaving them speeding away into the night—

Until a bullet goes flying into the front windshield, smashing it and sending the shards down onto the road, down into the _tires._

Sparks go flying into the night as the rubber is peeled and goes flying, Erik using his powers as much as he can to stop the car so Charles doesn’t kill them all by slamming on the brakes. He only just manages to stop the car with a strong jerk, sending them all flying forward, the seatbelts being the only thing stopping both Moira and Charles from being hurtled out of the broken windshield, but Erik actually _does_ fly forward, landing heavy on the concrete far in front of the car.

When Erik looks up from where he is on the ground, he looks to see Charles lifting his head up. There’s blood tricking down his forehead from where he smashed it against the steering wheel, his eyes immediately and desperately seeking out Erik’s.

Erik scrambles upright and right into the line of fire – not that it will really affect him, though – and tries to make his way back to Charles and Moira to get them out of the car. It’s hard to focus on getting the door unhinged when he’s busy deflecting bullets, his powers too new and foreign for him to focus on moving more than one thing at a time, especially something as fast as bullets but also as heavy as a car. It’s easier to focus on the heavy thing, though, so he pries it directly off the hinges – his car be damned, he can buy a fucking new one, it’s already riddled with bullet holes anyway – and uses it as a temporary shield for them, though he knows it won’t hold long.

“Charles, Moira, get out of the car!” He yells, the bullets pelting into the car door that he’s propping up against himself. “Goddamn it, get out of the fucking car and fucking run!”

Moira’s the first one to clamber her way out of the car, ducking behind Erik’s shield with a shriek as a bullet breaks the glass of the door over her head, the glass shattering down on top of her. Charles comes out after her then, grabbing her and tugging her along. Erik focuses enough to throw the door in the Marko’s direction, trying desperately to make any distraction he can while Charles helps Moira stagger along towards the safety of an alley.

With the door cast aside, Erik can begin focusing on deflecting the bullets, trying as hard as he can to deflect them – they’re coming too fast for him to stop them completely, so he can only change their course as he is, and that already is damn _hard._

For a second, the firing ceases, likely to change rounds of ammo, and Erik turns to Charles where he’s paused in the entrance of the alleyway.

 _“Run!”_ He shouts back at Charles, waving at him to _get a fucking move on_ when he looks back at him. “Just fucking go!” And the firing starts back up, the bullets coming flying once more. Erik manages to deflect one easily, but the second one—

_The second one—_

The second one goes careening off in Charles’ direction after his deflection.

There’s a wet sound and a scream, and for a moment, all Erik sees is red.

All around them, metal begins to clatter.

It begins to shiver, then shakes violently, being shoved around until it finally tears itself free of its holdings, going flying into the air.

Up and down the street, mailboxes are being uprooted from the sidewalks, sent flying into the air along with a swirl of coins and nails and paperclips and rubbish bins and lids and office supplies and headphones and hubcaps and car alarms are going off as they shift and skid along the ground and doors are being slammed open into walls and letters are fluttering down from the sky and streetlamps are flickering, their light dim and then suddenly too, too bright, lighting up the whole street, lighting up the swirling vortex of metal in flashes and lighting their way to join in the tornado of metal, all calling to him, all screaming, all staring at him where they can see him, suddenly around for all humans to see, and all he can see is his _rage_ , all of it, every single moment of it, his fury at the kids on the playground in elementary school and his bullies and his nightmares and the burglars who broke into their house when he eight and scared and the injustice of the world and Charles is screaming out for him, calling his name as loud as he can, asking him to please, please stop, Erik, please stop, but it doesn’t matter because there is his rage and all things in it and his sadness and his loneliness and Charles’ loneliness and people who do things to spite you and being beaten up and being left to die and having to fight for what he thought was a basic right and people who say you should die for loving someone of your own gender and people who steal from others and people who kidnap children and _Kurt Marko_ and—

Charles is screaming for him to stop—

There’s so much rage and he just wants it all to be done with and there’s a car lifted into the air, hurtling itself down at Marko’s head—

Charles is screaming his name, screaming please—

There’s so much noise and rage and it’s all just inches from killing Marko and—

 _And please, please_ —

Two inches from justice, just one more inch and—

_“Erik!”_


	7. Chapter 7

When he opens his eyes, it’s dark.

That’s all there is.

Darkness.

It’s cold, unwelcoming, and he’s floating in it.

Is he dead? He doesn’t want to be dead.

He closes his eyes and begins to cry.

Slowly, he feels himself being set upright, but when his feet touch the ground, he falls onto his knees, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“Am I dead, Raven?” He asks. He’s not even sure if she’s there. He can’t see.

There’s no answer.

“I don’t want to be dead,” he cries.

“No one wants to be dead,” someone says, and while it’s the voice of a young girl, he doesn’t dare open his eyes.

“It’s okay,” she says.

He opens his eyes.

He’s kneeling on a beach, the water lapping at the hem of his pants, brushing over his feet and pulling the sand between his toes. It’s not even a beach, though. It’s like a small, circular sandbar in the middle of the ocean, an endless, _endless_ ocean, stretching on in all directions, and every way he looks ends in the horizon. The sky is cloudy, and with the way the still waters of the ocean reflect it, it looks like _everything_ is sky, the ocean waters acting as a mirror so the world is endless and cut in half by the horizon line in every direction.

“I can’t be dead yet,” Erik cries and cries and cries.

“I have too much now,” he says. “I didn’t know before, but I have too much now to be dead.”

“Not like this,” he protests. “Not when I realise what it means to be alive, not when he needs me, and not when I need him.”

“I didn’t have anything before,” he explains. “I was a lonely man with no friends who worked his life away and thought love was for those who needed a pastime. I had my job and that was it, and I was fine with that, and I shouldn’t have been.

“And then I go and I fucking – I fucking save this stupid little doe-eyed doctor’s life and I follow him around and I laugh like I haven’t laughed in years and I’ve haven’t even told him that I love him.

“I love how he sings when he makes sandwiches and I love how he dances when no one’s looking but how he only dances to classical music or Frank Sinatra and I love his wit and I love when he laughs at my jokes and I love to make him happy.

“I love him,” he sobs, tears slipping down his face. “I love him, I love him, I love him, and I can’t let him go.”

The bare feet and white dress of a child he knows appear in front of him in the sand.

“It’s okay,” she says soothingly.

He shakes his head, sobbing, “No, no, no, it’s not okay, it’s not okay, it’s not…”

“It’s okay,” she says. “You’re going home now.”

“My home is where he is,” he says. “My home is where his is, on my side of the bed.”

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay.”

He closes his eyes and the world goes black.

—

It’s hard to open his eyes now.

In the distance, he hears a steady beeping sound. He’s not sure what it is.

It’s hard to move overall – it feels like his bones have been covered in rust and left to rot, making every movement he tries feel like it needs oil in order to bend or operate. Movement alone feels foreign, like he hasn’t moved in a long, long time.

He tries once again to open his eyes, but what he gets is a flood of light and he closes them again quickly, trying to peer out through his eyelashes to see what’s really happening around him, since it feels like his nerves are tired and having been awake in a long, long time either.

He tries to make a noise, but it gets caught in his dry throat, so he searches along his nerve endings, travelling down his arm to seek out his hand. All he seems to find is his smallest finger, his other fingers feeling rusted over still.

Trying his best, he taps his little finger, just to get something out of it. His neurons fire and he can _feel_ , he can _move_ , and, slowly, the rest of his hand becomes awake again, like it’s remembered something it forgot how to do. Muscle memory, they say. Maybe that’s true. Erik isn’t sure.

Slowly, testing his hand, he opens his eyes more and more, little by little.

He sees, then, on the edge of the bed he’s lying in, there’s a head of dark brown hair along his thigh, a soft face with closed eyes that he think might be blue.

“Charles,” he manages to say over the rasp of his throat, and, suddenly, those blue eyes are wide awake and clutching at his head. _God_ , touching his hand – he can feel that, feel the warmth in those fingers and that palm, feel how they wrap around his and how good and right they feel there.

“Erik,” he hears. “Erik, can you hear me?”

He smiles blearily and nods his head.

“Oh god,” he hears Charles cry, and he wishes the rest of the feeling would come back to him so he could move and kiss his stupid crying face. “Oh god, Erik, you’re alive.”

“Of course,” Erik grits out, then smirks. “And once I’m even more alive, I’m gonna take you out to dinner to eat a nice, juicy steak.”

“Of course you are, and I humbly accept your offer of a date,” Charles nods, and Erik can feel him nodding because he’s leaning against him. He can feel Charles’ eyes flutter shut against his thigh where he’s laid his head back down.

“God,” Charles says eventually. “I thought I lost you.”

“Nah,” Erik shakes his head slowly, using all of his effort to lean forward and try and kiss that pretty little head of his. “You couldn’t even if you tried.”


	8. Epilogue.

A few months later…

“I’m excited to meet your parents, Erik.”

He laughs. “You’ve met them before, Charles.”

“No, I met a patient’s parents before,” Charles corrects pointedly. Mostly, though, his point is kissing the tip of Erik’s nose. “Now I’m meeting my partner’s parents.”

“In that case,” Erik smiles, leaning up to peck a kiss to his lips and place his hands at his hips to keep him close, “I think you could afford to meet them a little later, especially after I’ve just gotten back from my especially-long business trip, don’t you think?”

To this, Charles laughs, and though he kisses him back, he eventually pulls away and shakes his head, saying, “No, no, we agreed to meet your parents at half-six, and that’s when we’ll meet them,” as he stands back upright, leaving his stomach at perfect eye-level for Erik from where he’s sitting on the bed.

“Fine,” Erik sighs, pressing his face into Charles’ stomach, stroking his hands down his thighs. “After.”

“After,” Charles agrees with a soft laugh, running his hand through Erik’s hair in a way that makes him hum delightedly against his stomach. It’s only through sheer force of will (read: Charles pulling at his tie and the promise of another kiss if he gets up to leave) that he manages to get up and leave.

—

“Still excited?” Erik asks as he pulls the car up into his parent’s driveway.

“Yes, of course,” Charles laughs, patting his arm gently. “Why, are you nervous, Erik?” Erik just makes a face that makes Charles laugh even more. “Come on, then, let’s go.”

As soon as they get to the door, it opens wide for them, Erik’s mother standing in the doorway to great them, with his father right behind.

“Erik!” She says cheerily, leaning in for a hug and a kiss to each of his cheeks.

“Mama,” he greets with a laugh before he lets go, allowing her to turn to Charles.

“And Charles,” she smiles wide, leaning in to give him a hug and a kiss on one cheek as well. “Oh, boys, it’s so good to see you. Please, please, come in,” she says, ushering them inside where they both shake hands with his father, sharing brief, friendly hugs.

“Thank you for all that you’ve done for our son,” Erik’s father sense as he shakes Charles’ hand. “We’re not sure if we can ever thank you enough.”

Charles nods and smiles wide. “Yes, of course. I do try my best.”

“We already have dinner ready, so we can all sit down,” his mother says, and that they do. Dinner itself is a long but easy ordeal, filled with stories of Charles’ life and his work – all cleaned up, of course. They do have to keep their appetites, after all. But, by the end of the night, they’re all laughing and sharing other various things about their respective days. When Erik is recounting the details of how his business trip went, he feels a clever foot hook around his ankle under the table, and has to scoot in just slightly closer to the table and clear his throat slightly when the a toe from aforementioned foot steals it way up his pant leg, clearly attempting to pull his leg into Charles’ lap. Next to him at the table, though, Charles is sitting as if he were paying attention to Erik’s story, though the half-smirk and twinkle of his eye tells Erik something far, far different.

Erik makes quick work then of his story and of clearing all the plates from the table, for which his mother fusses over him doing so, saying that she can take care of it. He simply laughs and kisses his mother’s cheek.

“We’d love to stay longer, but we really must get going,” Erik says with an affirming nod at Charles, who immediately takes note of his hustle and his meaning.

“Ah, yes, we really do,” Charles says, and Erik isn’t sure that he likes the mischievous grin he’s giving him. “But first I’d like to ask about those pictures of Erik hanging in the hallway, if I may?”

 _Oh, you dog,_ Erik thinks directly at Charles’ charming smile as his mother readily agrees. _You’re going to pay for that one later._

Regardless of Erik insisting their need to go, his mother releases her diatribe on each of the pictures, cooing at the picture of Erik when he was much younger playing on the beach, and commenting on how studious he was in school, always focusing on his studies. Nearly another hour later and his mother finally finishes her stories, having broken out even _more_ pictures to thoroughly embarrass Erik with, to which Charles was all too happy to listen, probably more out of want to drive Erik up the wall than really being enthralled with the stories, although he does seem to take some enjoyment out of them.

Eventually, they do make it back out to the car, his mother having sent them off with plenty of cake.

“Your mother is very sweet,” Charles comments, and Erik just throws him a look, to which Charles laughs happily and places a warm hand on his thigh. “Now, I believe we mentioned something earlier about _after_ , hm?”

“Oh, you’re gonna get after, alright.”

—

As soon as they make it back to Charles’ flat and they get the door open, Erik kicks the container of cake aside and shoves Charles back against the door to his flat, eliciting a gasp from the shorter man. Erik mouths along his jaw, pressing wet, open kisses everywhere, and burrowing his nose into the soft spot just behind Charles’ ear that he knows will make him gasp without fail.

“Drove me mad all night,” Erik rasps out against his neck, marking his statement with a pointed bite along his pulse point that makes Charles gasp again as his hands go to his hips, keeping him pressed up against the door. “What with that damned foot of yours tugging me around.”

Below him, Charles sniggers, “I try,” and Erik bites at his neck harshly again in order to shut him up. It proves quite effective, aside from the little moans and sounds he gets as he keeps working at his neck.

Slowly, Erik falls to his knees, nuzzling his face against Charles’ stomach, who hand inevitably finds it way into his hair. He seems to have a thing about Erik’s hair – “I like messing it up,” he had once said when Erik asked. “It’s always so perfectly coifed, I figured it could use it.” Erik’s just convinced he loves to have something to tug on and pull him around with. He certainly doesn’t mind if Charles is bossing him around like that. In fact, he fucking loves it.

“Mmn,” Erik hums as he presses his face into the crease of where Charles’ thigh meets his groin, and smiles when he hears Charles make a soft, keening sound. He must be biting his lip already. Erik noses along his groin, pressing kissing to the bulge in his trousers, most close-mouthed, some wet and open. Those are the ones that makes Charles say his name.

“Yes?” Erik answers with a smirk.

“As much as I love this,” Charles pants out, already flushed red around his face, “I swear to god that if you don’t fuck me soon that I am going to be so pissed off at you.”

Erik laughs against the wet spot of his trousers, “Yes, sir,” and that’s apparently enough for Charles to yank him up and drag him to the bedroom, both of them trying to strip those clothes the whole way as they keep bumping into each other intentionally and caressing newly exposed parts of bodies, Erik being quite fond of Charles’ ribs and back, and Charles quite fond of Erik’s sharp hipbones, constantly running his thumbs over the point of them as Erik shimmies out of his pants.

“On the bed,” Erik instructs, and, naked, Charles lays back onto the sheets, propping himself on his arms with his legs spread wide and his erection resting back against his stomach, a sight which Erik has to appreciate a moment before he actually goes to grab the lube.

“You’re absolutely obscene,” Erik says with a laugh as he squirts some out to rub between his fingers, tossing the bottle aside and leaning down over him to kiss along his inner thigh.

“Says you,” Charles says with an appreciative hum. “You should see the kind of view you make when you’re all spread out willingly for me, or when you’re on your knees sucking my cock with your hands behind your back.”

“I do love sucking your cock,” Erik laughs as he presses a kiss to the vein on the underside of Charles’ erection, moving up slightly more so he can press in a finger.

“Oh, Charles,” Erik smirks up at him. “You’re already a little loose here. Were you masturbating while I was gone?” He can easily slip two fingers in, to which Charles lets out a small groan. “I can easily feel two fingers in. You must have been very recently, hm?”

“Yes,” he gasps, already rocking back onto his fingers.

“Phone sex wasn’t enough for you, huh?” Erik teases, stretching his fingers wide inside of him.

“No,” Charles grits out as he adds a third lubed finger, trying to stretch him out even more.

“That’s something I love about you, Charles,” Erik hums, watching himself finger his partner open, watching the way that he presses himself back onto his fingers as he hooks them. “You’re always ready for more from me.”

“ _Yes,_ ” Charles answers with a hiss, now fucking himself back on Erik’s fingers in earnest, keening when he finds that spot for himself. Just as Charles is really getting into it, though, Erik pulls his fingers out, making Charles moan and press his feet hard into the mattress at the loss.

Erik leans across his body, then, reaching for the condom packet, tearing it open and easily rolling it down onto himself, all while looking down at Charles, who is shifting under him, ready and more than eager, even licking his lips for it. Erik smirks.

As he aligns himself at Charles’ entrance and begins to push in, he leans back over him, bearing his weight down on him so they’re pressed flush together and pressing kisses all over his chest and biting at his nipples until he’s begging for Erik to push in more, even grabbing at his hair and _making_ him shove himself all the way in. Once fully seated, Charles lets out what can only be described as a moan of utter relief, and Erik can’t say that he’s not exactly feeling the same way, being inside his tight, blissful warmth.

“Fuck, Charles,” Erik sighs.

“That’s what I would prefer you to be doing,” Charles says back to him, and that makes Erik smirk wide and long and begin to thrust, as hard as he can, so that Charles is thrown off balance. He hooks his arms around the backs of his knees, lifting him slightly so he can get an even better angle to thrust in at, this kind of access making it easier to thrust harder and faster into him, at a more brutal pace that just makes the good little doctor moan louder and louder.

“You want it hard, huh?” Erik asks, getting in a particularly hard thrust that makes Charles buck wildly against him. “I’ll give it to you hard.”

“Fuck yes,” Charles hisses, then reaching one hand down between them then to take himself in hand to stroke as in time with Erik’s thrusts as he can possibly manage. His head is thrown back onto the pillow behind him, his back arched so perfectly for Erik to thrust into, exposing the long, pale column of his throat in just a way that makes Erik want to suck on his Adam’s apple and place bruises from his tongue and teeth all over his body so everyone knows. They’d just have to look and they’d know he was taken, that he was _Erik’s_.

A sudden “fuck!” comes from below him, and as he looks down, Charles is coming across his own chest and stomach, and feels him clench around him, driving him mad as he thrusts in and out as he continues to roll his hips back onto Erik as he rides out his orgasm, Erik’s impending any moment.

Erik bends back over him, then, practically bending Charles in half just to see if he can lick away some of the come that he splattered across his chest. He manages to take away the few drops that land along his collarbone, but it isn’t much longer before Erik’s thrust start to become erratic.

“Come for me,” Charles says, nipping at his ear, and that’s all it takes to get Erik to go over the edge, spiraling down into his orgasm with a force that leaves them both trembling.

Slowly, carefully, Erik pulls out, and Charles gives a soft sigh and stretched out as he ties the condom and throws it away, coming back to flop down right on top of Charles, licking away the rest of the droplets of come from his stomach and chest, humming all the way.

“It’s all up from here, isn’t it?” Charles asks with a smile, most likely more to himself than to Erik, but Erik chuckles against his throat nonetheless.

“Yes, it is,” he answers, enunciating each word with a kiss to that pale, bruised throat of his, kissing each of his own markings he’s left behind there.

It most definitely is.


End file.
